The King of the Huns’ country did near the Traisen own
A very noble stronghold to everyone well known.
Its name was Traisen mauer where Helka lived of yore,
And practised such great virtues, scarce met with any more.”
From Traisen the cavalcade went on to Tulln, where the King of the Huns awaited his new bride, and whence he bore her to Vienna for the marriage, according to the legendary lay. As the Danube winds through the close-grown willow banks, the hills of the Wiener Wald are seen ahead and to the right, but while we are yet some miles from the northern spur of them we reach, on the same bank, one of the oldest of the Danube towns, the Tulln which has just been mentioned.
The flat plain in which it is situated—the Tullner Feld—has been the gathering place of great armies, and the town itself has seen much of battle. Though the legend of the “Nibelungen Lied” makes it the meeting place of Kriemhilda with Etzel or Attila, history associates it with one of the King of the Huns’ most disastrous battles, when he is said not only to have been defeated, but to have had forty thousand of his warriors slain. This, too, may be legend, but certain it is that, as Comagenæ, the town was an important Roman station, and that at the beginning of the ninth century Charlemagne presented it to Passau, whose bishops once owned territory of royal extent.
When, in 1683, Vienna was closely invested by the Turks, it was in the Tullner Feld that the armies of John Sobieski, King of Poland, and the Duke of Lorraine united and marched to the relief of the Austrian capital. Vienna was in imminent danger when the Emperor Leopold implored Sobieski to hasten to his assistance, even without an army: “My troops are now assembling. The bridge over the Danube is already constructed at Tulln, to afford you a passage. Place yourself at their head, however inferior in numbers, your name alone, so terrible to the enemy, will ensure a victory!” Sobieski could not resist this flattery and “at the head of thirty one thousand horse, traversed Silesia and Moravia with the rapidity of a Tartar horde, but on his arrival at Tulln, found the bridge unfinished, and no troops except a corps under the Duke of Lorraine. “Does the Emperor consider me as an adventurer,” exclaimed the disappointed monarch. “I quitted my army to command his. It is not for myself, but for him, that I fight.” Pacified, however, by the representations of the Duke of Lorraine, he awaited the arrival of his own army, which reached the Danube on the 5th September, and the junction of the German succours was completed on the 7th. The bridge was ready—presumably a bridge of boats—and Sobieski at length set forth at the head of an army of between sixty and seventy thousand men, and on the morning of the 12th the hard-pressed garrison and citizens of Vienna, “descried with rapture the Christian standards floating on the summit of the Kahlenberg.”
An old castle in Tulln was at one time the haunt of a couple of ghosts. The one that of a fair but frail lady who had been killed by her husband on discovering her faithlessness, the other that of her attendant maid. This ghostly couple, ran the tradition, only made their appearance on Mondays at midnight—presumably it was on a Monday that the tragedy happened; but a “barefooted monk” succeeded in exorcising the ghost of the maid, though the mistress refused to be amenable to the ghost-laying ritual. According to Planché, quoting an unnamed “prudent antiquary,” “the whole history” is to be found in the archives of a certain noble house; but as it would redound to the prejudice of the descendants, should the name be made known, it has been passed over in silence. Some time ago an attempt was made to pull down the building, but the indignant phantom raised such a racket that the workmen beat a retreat, and the project was abandoned!
A little beyond Tulln we pass the villages of Ober and Unter Aigen, or the village Langenlebarn, for straggling along the river bank, the two places seem sometimes to be given one name. This point is interesting as being that of old gold-seeking attempts. The sands of the Danube have yielded gold, and those hereabouts seemingly most successfully. The local quidnuncs accounted for this by saying that when in the year 926 a certain Bishop Draculf was drowned near this spot, he was carrying secured in his girdle about forty pounds’ weight of gold, which he had smuggled out of a monastery that he had been visiting! The legend is one that might well have inspired Ingoldsby. Another small village further along on the same side of the river is Zeiselmauer, the old Roman Cetium, and birthplace of that St. Florian of whom we learned something a little below Linz.
After leaving Tulln, as we near the northernmost “bergs” of the Wiener Wald, the scenery becomes once more beautiful; on the left are still the low lands through which a number of small branches of the river find their way, but on the right, the wooded hillsides that we are approaching lend a fresh variety to the landscape. Soon is seen ahead of us on a rocky knoll the square tower of the ruined castle of Greifenstein sometimes described as having been the prison in which Duke Leopold kept Richard Cœur de Lion captive in an iron cage. The claims of Dürrenstein, and Trifels are more strongly upheld, and are accepted by the historians; in the case of Greifenstein the matter rests on nothing firmer than the “they say” of tradition.