His largess, like the gentle rain,
Refresheth land and folk.
Vienna and the memorable Wartburg in Thuringia were the acknowledged centres of taste and good breeding. They were the courts of last resort in all questions of style, grammar and versification.
It will not be necessary to follow the growth of Vienna in detail during the last six hundred years. The dangers to which the city was exposed from time to time were formidable. They came chiefly from two quarters—from Bohemia and from Hungaro-Turkey. Charles IV. and Wenzel favored the Bohemians at the expense of the Germans, and preferred Prague to Vienna as a residence. The Czechish nation increased rapidly in wealth and culture until, having embraced the doctrines of Huss, it felt itself strong enough to assert a quasi-independence. The Hussite wars which ensued in the fifteenth century ended in the downfall of Bohemia. But the Austrian duchies, and even Bavaria and Saxony, did not escape without cruel injuries. More than once the fanatic Taborites laid the land waste up to the gates of Vienna. The Reformation, a century later, did not take deep root in Austria. At best it was only tolerated, and the Jesuit reaction, encouraged by Rudolph II. and Matthias, made short work of it. The Thirty Years' war gave Ferdinand II. an opportunity of restoring Bohemia to the Roman Catholic communion. The victory of the White Hill (1620) prostrated Bohemia at his feet: the Hussite preachers were executed or banished, the estates of the nobility who had taken part in the rebellion were confiscated, and the Catholic worship reinstated by force of arms. So thoroughly was the work done that Bohemia at the present day is, next to the Tyrol, the stronghold of Catholicism. But Ferdinand's success, complete to outward appearance, was in reality a blunder. The Czechish and the German nationalities were permanently estranged, and the former, despoiled, degraded, incapacitated for joining the work of reform upon which the latter has finally entered, now constitutes an obstacle to progress. While the Austrian duchies are at present extremely liberal in their religious and political tendencies, Bohemia and Polish Galicia are confederated with the Tyrol in opposing every measure that savors of liberalism. Bohemia has been surnamed the Ireland of the Austrian crown.
The union of Hungary with the house of Habsburg has always been personal rather than constitutional. The Hungarians claimed independence in all municipal and purely administrative matters. Moreover, during the Thirty Years' war, and even later, a large portion of the land was in possession of the Turks and their allies, the Transylvanians, with whom the Hungarians were in sympathy. The first great siege of Vienna by the Turks was in 1529—the last, and by far the most formidable, in 1683. The city escaped only through the timely assistance of the Poles under Sobieski. Ten years later the tide had changed. The Austrian armies, led by Prince Eugene, defeated the Turks in a succession of decisive battles, and put an end for ever to danger from that quarter. Hungary and Transylvania became permanent Austrian possessions.
Amid such alternations of fortune the growth of Vienna was necessarily slow. In 1714, after six centuries of existence, its population amounted to only 130,000. The city retained all the characteristics of a fortress and frontier-post. The old part, or core, now called the "inner town," was a compact body of houses surrounded by massive fortification-walls and a deep moat. Outside of this was a rayon or clear space six hundred feet in width, separating the city from the suburbs. These suburbs, Leopoldstadt, Mariahilf, etc., now incorporated with the inner city in one municipal government, were then small detached villages. From time to time the rayon was encroached upon by enterprising builders, with the connivance of the emperor or the garrison commander. The disastrous wars with France at the end of the last century and beginning of the present were in reality a gain to Vienna. Napoleon's bombardment and capture of the city in 1809, before the battle of Wagram, demonstrated conclusively that the fortifications were unable to withstand modern artillery. Accordingly, after the general European peace had been established by the Congress of Vienna, the city was declared officially by the emperor to be no longer a fortification. But the walls and ditch, so far as they had not been injured by the French, were still suffered to remain: they were substantially intact as late as 1848, and were strong enough to enable the revolutionists who had possession of the city to hold it for forty-eight hours against the army of Prince Windischgrätz.
The final reconstruction of the city was not begun in earnest until 1857, and occupied ten years or more. The walls were leveled to the ground, the moat was filled in, a broad girdle-street (the Ringstrasse) laid out to encircle the inner city, and the adjacent ground on either side was converted into building-lots. In this brief space of time Vienna was changed from a quasi-mediæval town to a modern capital of the most pronounced type. The Ringstrasse became a promenade like that of the old Paris boulevards, but broader, grander and lined with palatial edifices no whit inferior to the French. The metamorphosis is so startling that a tourist revisiting the city after an absence of twenty years would have difficulty in persuading himself that he was indeed in the residence of Maria Theresa, Joseph II. and Metternich. No American city can exhibit a like change in the same time. Our cities, although expanding incessantly, have preserved their original features. Even new Chicago, springing from the ashes of the old, has not departed from the former ground-plan and style of building. And no American city can point to a succession of buildings like the Franz Joseph Barracks, the Cur Salon with its charming park, the Grand Hôtel and the Hôtel Impérial, the Opera-house, the Votive Church, the new Stock Exchange, and the Rudolf Barracks. When the projected House of Deputies, the City Hall, and the University building are completed, the Ring street will deserve to stand by the side of the Rue de Rivoli and the Champs Élysées. The quondam suburbs (Vorstädte), eight in number, are now one with the city proper. Encircling them is the mur d' octroi, or barrier where municipal tolls are levied upon articles of food and drink. Outside of this barrier, again, are the suburbs of the future, the Vororte, such as Favoriten, Fünfhaus, Hernals, etc. The growth of the population is rapid and steady. In 1714 it was 130,000, in 1772 only 193,000. A century later, in 1869, it had risen to 811,000 (including the Vororte); at the present day it can scarcely fall short of 1,000,000.
Not in population and adornment alone has Vienna progressed. Much has been done, or at least projected, for the comfort and health of the residents and for the increase of trade. The entire city has been repaved with Belgian pavement, the houses renumbered after the Anglo-American fashion. The railroads centring in the city are numerous, and the stations almost luxurious in their appointments. But the two chief enterprises are the Semmering aqueduct and the Danube Regulation. The former, begun in 1869 and completed in 1873, would do honor to any city. It is about fifty miles in length, and has a much greater capacity than the Croton aqueduct. The pure, cold Alpine water brought from two celebrated springs near the Semmering Pass, flows into the distributing reservoir on the South Hill, near the Belvedere Palace, at an elevation of one hundred and fifty feet above the city. The pressure is great enough to throw a jet nearly one hundred feet high from the fountain in the Schwarzenberg Square. The Danube Regulation, as its name implies, is an attempt to improve the navigation of the river. The Danube, which in this part of its course has a general flow from north-west to south-east, approaches within a few miles of Vienna. Here, at Nussdorf, it breaks into two or three shallow and tortuous channels, which meander directly away from the city, as if in sheer willfulness, and reunite at the Lobau, as far below the city as Nussdorf is above it. The "regulation" consists in a new artificial channel, cut in a straight line from Nussdorf to the Lobau. In length it is about nine miles, in breadth about twelve hundred feet: the average depth of water will be not less than ten feet. It was begun in 1869 and finished in April, 1875. This new channel, which passes the Leopoldstadt suburb a short distance outside the late exhibition grounds, will render unnecessary the transshipment of goods and passengers at Nussdorf and the Lobau respectively, and will also, it is hoped, prevent the inundations by which the low region to the north of the river has been so often ravaged.
Berlin is inferior to Vienna in antiquity and in variety of incident and association. The capital of the present German empire consisted originally of two small rival towns, or rather villages, standing almost side by side on opposite banks of the Spree. The elder, Cöln, was incorporated as a municipality in 1232: the other, Berlin, is mentioned for the first time in 1244. Both names are of Vendic (Slavic) origin, and designated villages of the hunting and fishing Vends, who were dispossessed by German colonists.
Cöln-Berlin, the marches of Brandenburg, East and West Prussia—in fact, all the now Germanized lands to the east of the Elbe—owe their Teutonic character to a great reflux, a reconquest so to speak, which is barely mentioned in the usual textbooks of German history, yet which is one of the most noteworthy phenomena in the development of modern Europe. At the beginning of the fourth century German tribes (German in the widest sense of the term) occupied the broad expanse from the Rhine to the Dwina and the head-waters of the Dnieper. A century later they had receded as far as the Vistula. Still another century later, about 500, the German linguistic domain was bounded on the east by the Ens, the Bohemian Hills, the upper Main, the Saal and the Elbe. The downfall of the Thuringian kingdom was the occasion of Slavic encroachments even on the left bank of the Elbe between Stendal and Lüneburg. This German recession, which boded the Slavization not only of Eastern but also of Central Europe, was due to various causes, many of which are veiled in the impenetrable darkness which still hangs over the early Middle Ages. The chief causes were undoubtedly the Germanic migration over the Roman world and the settlement of the Franks in Northern Gaul and the Saxons in England.