Timeline of Vienna

A legionary camp on the Danube. Rome fortifies Vindobona on the frontier, subordinate to the larger town at Carnuntum. Its outline survives in the street plan of the first district.

Marcus Aurelius dies. The emperor is thought to have died at Vindobona while campaigning against the Marcomanni on the Danube.

The frontier collapses. Roman authority on the middle Danube fails and the camp is abandoned. The site is not entirely deserted, but the town is.

The Babenbergs move their seat. Henry II Jasomirgott makes Vienna his residence, and Austria becomes a duchy in its own right.

Richard the Lionheart’s ransom. Captured near Vienna returning from crusade and held at Dürnstein, the English king is ransomed for a sum that pays for Vienna’s new walls and its mint.

Vienna gets its town charter. Staple rights force merchants passing through to offer their goods for sale in the city, and it grows rich on the Danube trade.

The Habsburgs arrive. Rudolf I defeats Ottokar II of Bohemia at Marchfeld. The family will hold Austria for the next 640 years.

The university is founded. Rudolf IV establishes the Alma Mater Rudolphina, the oldest university in the German-speaking world still in existence.

The Wiener Gesera. Vienna’s Jewish community is destroyed by forced conversion, expulsion and burning, and the synagogue on Judenplatz is pulled down. Its foundations are excavated in the 1990s beneath the Holocaust memorial.

The first Ottoman siege. Suleiman the Magnificent reaches Vienna late in the season with his heavy guns bogged down behind him, and withdraws after three weeks.

The second Ottoman siege is broken. After two months, a relief army under Jan Sobieski charges down from the Kahlenberg. The Ottoman advance into central Europe ends here, and the Baroque city is built on the confidence that follows.

Plague, and the vow that builds Karlskirche. Charles VI promises a church during the last great epidemic. Fischer von Erlach begins it in 1716.

Maria Theresa succeeds. Forty years of administrative reform, compulsory schooling, and the rebuilding of Schönbrunn into the palace that stands now.

Mozart plays at Schönbrunn. Aged six, he performs for Maria Theresa in the Hall of Mirrors. He settles in Vienna in 1781 and dies there in 1791.

The Prater is opened to the public. Joseph II gives the imperial hunting ground to the city, over aristocratic objections.

Napoleon takes Vienna twice. The Peace of Pressburg follows the first occupation; the second brings the bombardment during which Haydn dies.

The Congress of Vienna. Europe is redrawn in the Hofburg over nine months of negotiation and rather more dancing, giving the city a reputation it has traded on ever since.

Revolution and Franz Joseph. The March revolution is suppressed by December, Metternich flees, and an eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph takes a throne he will hold for sixty-eight years.

The walls come down. Franz Joseph orders the fortifications demolished and the Ringstrasse laid out, lined with the institutions of a liberal empire: opera, museums, parliament, university, city hall.

The Court Opera opens. The reception is poor and one of its two architects kills himself; the other dies weeks later. Neither sees it open.

The World Exhibition, and the crash. Vienna hosts the World’s Fair in the Prater. The stock market collapses nine days after it opens and the depression lasts years.

The Secession. Klimt and others resign from the Künstlerhaus and build their own hall the following year, with the motto: to every age its art, to art its freedom.

Karl Lueger becomes mayor. He modernises Vienna’s utilities and transport and pioneers a modern political antisemitism that Hitler later cited as formative.

Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. Dated 1900, it sells slowly. He is already seeing patients at Berggasse 19, where he will stay until 1938.

Klimt paints The Kiss. Shown at the Kunstschau in Vienna and bought by the state before it is finished. It now hangs in the Belvedere.

The empire ends. Charles I renounces participation in government, the Republic of German-Austria is declared, and a capital built for fifty million people finds itself governing six.

Red Vienna begins. The Social Democrats win an absolute majority and hold it until 1934, building 65,000 flats, clinics, kindergartens and baths on a steeply progressive local tax.

Karl-Marx-Hof is finished. A kilometre long, 1,272 flats, covering a fifth of its own site. It is still fully occupied.

Civil war. Four days of fighting end with the army shelling the workers’ housing blocks with artillery. The Social Democrats are banned and Red Vienna is over.

Dollfuss is murdered. The chancellor who suspended parliament and built the clerical dictatorship is killed in his own office by Austrian Nazis in a failed putsch.

The Anschluss. German troops enter Austria and Hitler addresses some 200,000 people on Heldenplatz. Vienna’s Jewish population is immediately subjected to public humiliation, robbery and expulsion.

Kristallnacht. Almost every synagogue in Vienna is destroyed. Only the Stadttempel survives, because it stood in a residential block and burning it would have taken the street with it.

The community is destroyed. Of roughly 180,000 Jews in Vienna in 1938, some 65,000 Austrian Jews are murdered. Most of the rest are driven into exile, Freud among them.

Bombing and the battle for Vienna. Allied raids from 1944 and a week of street fighting in April 1945 leave a fifth of the city’s buildings damaged or destroyed, including the Opera and the roof of St Stephen’s.

Four sectors. Vienna is divided between the Allies with the first district under joint four-power control — the setting of The Third Man, filmed here in 1948.

The State Treaty. Signed in the Belvedere, restoring full sovereignty on condition of permanent neutrality. The last occupying soldier leaves in October.

The Opera reopens. Ten days after the treaty, with Fidelio — an opera about a prisoner released, chosen deliberately.

Vienna becomes a UN city. The Vienna International Centre opens, joining Geneva and Nairobi as a UN headquarters. Neutrality has made the city useful.

Austria joins the European Union. A referendum passes with two-thirds in favour.

The historic centre is listed. UNESCO inscribes the Innere Stadt, the Ringstrasse and Schönbrunn. The listing is later placed in danger over a high-rise plan near the Konzerthaus.

Smoking is banned indoors. After a decade of political argument, Austria’s cafés and restaurants go smoke-free in November.