Who ruled Vienna?

Vienna stands on the Danube where the river leaves the last foothills of the Alps and enters the plains that lead east towards Hungary. That position made it a frontier post for the Romans, a bulwark against the Ottomans and, for more than six centuries, the seat of the Habsburgs. It was the capital of one of Europe's great multinational empires until 1918, and its later history has been shaped by the effort to be the capital of a small republic instead.

Celtic peoples lived in the area before the Romans arrived. Around the end of the 1st century CE the Roman Empire built a legionary fortress called Vindobona on the Danube frontier, with a civilian town beside it. The fortress's outline can still be traced in the street plan of the inner city. After Roman authority faded in the 5th century, the region passed through the hands of Germanic peoples, Avars and Slavs before Frankish and then Bavarian rule pushed the frontier back east. Hungarian raids made the area insecure until the 10th century.

The Babenberg margraves, later dukes of Austria, made Vienna their residence in the mid-12th century, and the Duchy of Austria was created in 1156. The town grew on Danube trade and on the crusader traffic heading east; St Stephen's Cathedral, begun in this period, became its landmark. After the Babenbergs died out, Rudolf of Habsburg defeated King Ottokar II of Bohemia in 1278 and took Austria for his family. Vienna's university was founded in 1365. The Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus captured the city in 1485 and ruled from it until his death in 1490. From the 15th century Habsburg rulers were usually elected emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, and Vienna was usually the seat of the imperial court.

Twice the Ottoman Empire besieged the city. Suleiman the Magnificent failed to take it in 1529, and in 1683 an army relieving the second siege, led by the Polish king John III Sobieski, routed the Ottomans outside the walls on 12 September. A severe plague had struck in 1679. Once the Ottoman threat receded, the nobility filled the city and its suburbs with Baroque palaces, including the Belvedere and an enlarged Schönbrunn. Under Maria Theresa and her successors, Vienna became a centre of music for Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Napoleon's troops occupied Vienna in 1805 and 1809, but after his defeat the Congress of Vienna (1814 to 1815) redrew the map of Europe here under the guidance of Metternich. The revolution of 1848 was crushed in the city in October of that year. In 1857 Franz Joseph ordered the old fortifications demolished, and the Ringstraße, a boulevard of public buildings and apartment palaces, took their place. By 1910 the capital of Austria-Hungary had about two million inhabitants and a brilliant, troubled culture that included Freud, Klimt, Mahler and Schoenberg, along with a rising tide of political antisemitism.

The empire fell apart in 1918. The Social Democrats who governed "Red Vienna" between the wars built tens of thousands of council flats, until civil war and dictatorship ended their rule in 1934. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, and the Nazi regime expelled or murdered most of Vienna's large Jewish community. Soviet troops took the city in April 1945, and Allied bombing and street fighting left heavy damage. Vienna was divided among four occupying powers until the Austrian State Treaty was signed in the Belvedere on 15 May 1955 and Austria declared permanent neutrality.

Neutrality made Vienna a meeting place during the Cold War and a host to international bodies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, OPEC and one of the main offices of the United Nations. The city has again passed two million inhabitants and is by far the largest city in Austria.