| Most visitors connect Vienna with a romantic place full of Habsburg nostalgia and musical resonances. It is, still today, but more.
The first settlement of any substance was Roman. The city was called Vindibona, but was in fact never more than a garrison town. It was only with the rise of the Babenberg clan in the tenth century that Vienna became an important city. In the 1278 the city fell to Rudolf of Habsburg, but had to compete for centuries with Prague, Linz and Graz as the imperial residence on account of its vulnerability to attack from the Turks, who first laid siege to it in 1529.
It was only with the removal of the Turkish threat in 1683 that the court based itself here permanently. The great aristocratic families, grown fat on the profits of the Turkish wars, flooded in to build palaces and summer residences in a frenzy of construction that gave Vienna its Baroque character.
Imperial Vienna was never a wholly German city: as the capital of a cosmopolitan empire, it attracted great minds from all over central and eastern Europe.
By the end of the Habsburg era it had become a breeding ground for the ideological movements of the age: nationalism, socialism, zionism and anti-semitism, all flourished here.
This turbulence was reflected in the cultural sphere, and the ghosts of Freud, Klimt, Schiele, Mahler and Schönberg are nowadays bigger tourist draws than the old stand-bys like the Lippizaner horses or the Vienna Boy's Choir.
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