Original subtitles

This is the Danube,

the most majestic river in Europe.

And on its banks stands Vienna.

Imperial city.

This is its story,

a story peopled by a cast of giants from Suleiman the Magnificent

to Napoleon, from Mozart and Mahler to Freud, Hitler and Stalin.

It grew as a bastion of Christendom against Islam,

of Catholicism against Protestantism.

And it all happened because of one family, a family whose empire,

at its greatest, stretched from Peru to Poland,

from the Netherlands to Naples.

This is the rise and fall of the House of Habsburg.

This is how Vienna became the imperial city of Europe,

the paramount city,

the city of the world.

The strategic position of Vienna on the Danube, between the Black Forest

and the Black Sea, was first appreciated by the ancient Romans.

They built a forward military base here

to defend the empire against endless attacks by Eastern barbarians.

These are the ruins of Vindobona,

the Roman town on the site of present-day Vienna.

But its real importance was for future dynasties

who liked to play up its Roman past

to presage their own future imperial glory.

Creating a heroic narrative for the city, and for themselves,

the Habsburgs would help transform Vienna from a small frontier town

to one of the world's greatest cities.

They would use every medium - architecture, sculpture, printing,

music and theatrical spectacle

to glorify the city and project their own power.

That's the point.

This was all an act.

It was all a show.

Vienna would become the inspiration, the magnet, the stage for Mozart,

Beethoven, Strauss and Mahler.

It would also become an intellectual hotbed

for some of the most brilliant,

and the most dangerous thinkers of modern times.

This is the story of empire,

empire of conquerors, courtesans and composers,

palaces, churches and coffee houses.

But also, the empire of cultures, of nations, of ideas,

monstrous ideas that killed millions,

wonderful ideas that helped create our world.

Yes, in so many ways,

Vienna is the capital of the empire of the mind.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire,

Central Europe became the battlefield

of rival tribes and warlords.

They had much in common - the Roman legacy, the use of Latin,

and faith in Christianity.

Then in the eighth century, a brilliant, harsh, Frankish warlord,

Charlemagne, Charles the Great, managed to unite much of Europe.

Charlemagne created the idea of a pan-European state,

a new Roman Empire based on two pillars,

Christianity and a powerful European king,

known as the Holy Roman Emperor.

In 800, he was crowned by the Pope in Rome,

and henceforth, the status of the Holy Roman Emperors

justified their actions in the name of Christendom.

These Holy Roman Emperors became, effectively,

kings of a wider Germany,

that later extended to include bits of modern France, Italy and Bohemia,

with its capital, Prague.

At the edge of this empire

was the relatively insignificant town of Vienna.

But by the 12th century, Vienna was becoming an increasingly

important centre of German civilisation.

Work began on a new church that would go on to become the mighty

St Stephen's Cathedral,

a masterpiece of Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

The church was founded in 1137,

the year in which Vienna is first referred to as a city.

The cathedral's South Tower reaches 446 feet,

still the city's highest point.

And in the centuries ahead,

this cathedral would be the magnificent stage

for the drama of Vienna.

When the first Habsburg Archduke became Holy Roman Emperor,

it was here, on the altar,

that he inscribed his mysterious code of power,

A, E, I, O, U.

And he inscribed them in different places all across his domains.

And during his lifetime, no-one knew what they meant.

Had they known, they would have seemed utterly preposterous.

The Emperor didn't even reveal

whether the code was Latin or German.

On his deathbed, he revealed what the letters stood for,

and by the time he revealed them,

they no longer seemed quite so ridiculous.

Here's what they stood for,

"The whole world is dominated by Austria."

I'm no German scholar, but these letters signify, in German,

"Alles Erdreich ist Osterreich untertan."

During the next 500 years,

Vienna would become the capital of the Habsburg family monarchy,

and effectively, the headquarters of the Holy Roman Emperors.

The story of the rise of the Habsburgs

possesses all the rollicking heroes

and extravagant blood-letting of a medieval myth.

In 1273, a new prince from a rising family

was elected king of the Germans.

His name was Rudolf, and he came from the family of Habsburg.

They'd started in a Swiss castle,

in an eyrie named The Hawk's Nest, Habsburg.

And now they'd expanded their holdings into Austria.

Rudolf was 55,

and the electors who chose German kings

believed he would be no threat.

They were wrong.

Rudolf, though already old by medieval standards,

would go on to rule from his base in Vienna for 17 years.

And the Habsburgs would dominate Europe for the next half-millennium.

But Rudolf's rise to power would not go unchallenged.

His principal rival for control of Middle Europe came from the north -

Ottokar, King of Bohemia.

In 1278, Ottokar, with his Bohemian army,

began the march southwards towards the Danube.

Rudolf and his army rode out from Vienna to meet them.

A decisive battle between Rudolf von Habsburg,

and Ottokar, King of Bohemia, took place right here on the Marchfeld,

east of Vienna. The two sides met in August, 1278, in sweltering heat.

They fought all day, and they fought themselves to a standstill.

It was so hot that the knights in their armour

started to faint in droves.

At this point, Rudolf deployed the fresh brigade of cavalry

he'd hidden right up this hill.

They charged down into the Bohemians and routed them.

Faced with defeat, the Bohemians murdered their own king, Ottokar.

He was stripped naked,

butchered and Rudolf displayed his body in the streets of Vienna.

This was a victory that would mark

the birth of a great European dynasty,

and transform the fate of Vienna.

When Rudolf died in 1291, it was his son, Albert, who succeeded him,

first as Duke of Austria, and, ultimately, as King of the Germans.

Albert was a shrewd and just ruler, but as a man, he was terrifying,

vicious and arrogant.

His face was distinguished by a gaping cavity

where his eye should have been.

When some enemies had tried to poison him,

his doctors insisted that he be hung upside down

for long periods of time

to allow the poison to seep out.

In the process, somehow, he'd lost his eye.

Everyone called him Albert One Eye.

Albert had a fearsome reputation, not only with his many foes,

but also within his own family,

and eventually this would be his undoing.

On May Day, 1308, Albert rode out with his entourage,

who included his 19-year-old nephew, John.

As they rode, John tried to persuade his uncle to return the lands

he'd taken from his family.

Albert refused.

John, furious,

rowed across the river and gathered together a posse of assassins.

When Albert himself crossed, they lay in wait, fell upon him,

and stabbed him. They left him dying in a pool of his blood.

The murderers fled,

only to be ruthlessly hunted down by Albert's successors.

One day of brutal revenge, presided over by his children,

saw 63 of John's relatives beheaded.

As blood spurted from them, Albert's daughter cried out in ecstasy,

"This is like being bathed in May dew."

The bitter family feud would halt the rise of Vienna,

and keep the Habsburgs out of power for 30 years.

But they were still one of the most powerful families

within the Holy Roman Empire.

They needed a statesman.

And now they produced a young man of astonishing vision and guts,

Rudolf IV, the Founder.

Rudolf inherited the Habsburg lands at just 19.

But he'd been brought up at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor,

his father-in-law,

and from the start, he was wildly ambitious, creative,

a visionary, energetic, and I've come here to the Habsburg Archives

to see his most ingenious creation.

Rudolf craved the ultimate prize, the imperial crown.

But he didn't have the same status as the German prince electors

who chose both the German king and the emperor.

So Rudolf came up with a cunning plan -

he invented the title archduke

to make his family more important than their rivals.

Kathrin Kininger is a medieval specialist at the archives,

and she's going to show me how he did it.

Kathrin, tell me what this document is,

and why it's so important.

So this is one of the most famous

medieval documents of Austrian history.

It claims to be of the 12th century, but actually,

it was made in the middle of the 14th century.

It's a forgery. And what does it claim?

So the purpose of the forgery

was to increase the prestige of the Habsburg family of Austria,

the Habsburg dynasty.

And didn't he invent some titles in here?

Yeah, for example, he invented the title archduke.

It was an invention of Rudolf IV.

And how do we know this is a forgery?

Actually, it's quite difficult,

because the forgery is really, really, very good.

When you look at it,

everything from the outside looks quite authentic

because they use the seal,

this is the original seal of Frederick I,

and they transferred it from the original document to the forgery.

And that's up to the 19th century,

everyone believed that it was the real thing.

All cities have their founding myths,

but none have been based on quite such a brazen fraud.

And it would work for centuries.

It was a challenge to the ruling Holy Roman Emperor of the time,

Charles VI, King of Bohemia, and it wasn't just political either.

Rudolf also wanted Vienna to rival the Bohemian capital, Prague.

Rudolf embellished and promoted both his dynasty and his capital.

He invented a new title for himself, Archduke of Austria,

which placed him above all the other princes and dukes.

And in Vienna, he remodelled St Stephen's Cathedral

and he founded this.

In 1365, he created Vienna University,

one of the oldest in Europe.

Even today, it's known as Alma Mater Rudolphina.

Rudolf had laid the foundations for Vienna

to become one of Europe's great cities.

Had he lived longer, who knows what he might have achieved?

But sadly, for Vienna and the Habsburgs, he died at just 26.

But Rudolf's embellishment of Vienna had not been cheap,

and he'd had to borrow to pay for it.

The Habsburg dukes depended on the Jews for financial loans,

like many medieval rulers.

It was a close relationship - the Jews lived under royal protection.

This Judenplatz was the site of the Jewish city

where the Jews all lived,

and this, now the Holocaust Memorial,

was the site of the community's synagogue.

The Royal Court was right next door.

But this relationship was ambivalent. It led to resentment.

And in 1421, it exploded in a savage pogrom against the Jewish community.

Now Archduke Albert V turned against the Jews,

first crippling them with taxes,

then torturing them when they couldn't pay.

The pogrom climaxed with the lynching,

torturing and burning at the stake of hundreds of Jews,

as the Jewish community was systematically destroyed.

Finally, the Duke issued a decree

that all Jewish children under the age of 15

should be abducted and forcibly converted to Christendom.

The surviving Jews retired to their community synagogue

and locked themselves in. After a siege of two or three days,

they committed suicide en masse by setting the synagogue alight.

A Christian merchant of the time

gleefully celebrated the Jewish tragedy

by putting up this plaque which reads, "The raging fire of 1421

"cleansed the city of the vile crimes of the Hebrew dogs."

The boundless ambitions of the House of Habsburg

finally reached their fulfilment

with the unlikely figure of Frederick III.

In 1442, he was crowned Emperor by the Pope in Rome.

Frederick was the first Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor,

the first of many,

and everything about him was big -

his ambitions, the length of his reign, and his mountainous stomach.

He was known as Frederick the Fat.

He was shrewd, patient, long-suffering,

but also notoriously sluggish and vacillating.

The Pope said that he wanted to conquer the world

whilst sitting down.

And in Germany, his nickname was the Arch Sleepyhead of the empire.

On becoming Emperor,

he confirmed Rudolf the Founder's forged document.

And henceforth, the Habsburgs would always be Archdukes of Austria.

This is the Hofberg, the ancient city fortress of Vienna.

And when Frederick III, Frederick the Fat,

became Holy Roman Emperor,

this became his imperial headquarters.

But Frederick's ambitions always exceeded

both his energy and his resources.

And it wasn't long before his rivals were circling.

Ever since the murder of Albert One Eye,

the House of Habsburg had been deeply divided.

Now Frederick was challenged by his own brother, another Albert,

who marched on Vienna in 1462,

intending to wrest power from him and his son and heir, Maximilian.

Albert allied himself with the Bohemian warlord,

and, together, they came down to Vienna and besieged Fat Frederick,

his wife, and Maximilian here at the Hofberg.

This is, in fact, one of the very few parts of the Hofburg Palace

that dates from Frederick's time.

It looked like everything was lost,

but Frederick endured all this with his usual mixture

of sleepy patience and obstinate tenacity

that all would turn out right.

And so it did.

The siege was lifted, Albert died, and Frederick swallowed his lands.

But these family feuds had distracted him

from a greater danger -

his dynamic neighbour, the King of Hungary, Matthias.

In 1482, Matthias attacked Vienna. Frederick ingloriously fled.

He'd lost his capital.

But once again, Frederick succeeded by simply outliving his enemies.

And when Matthias died, he retook Vienna without a fight.

In celebration, he finished the building of St Stephen's,

and it was he who inscribed the letters of his code -

A, E, I, O, U -

"The whole world is dominated by Austria," - on the altar.

And he designed a special place for himself, centre stage.

When he died in 1493, he'd ruled longer than his supposed ancestor,

the Roman Emperor Augustus.

During his long reign, Frederick the Fat

had endured an astonishing number of disasters.

And yet he triumphed in the end.

He'd even lost a leg to diabetes, and survived that.

But when he finally died, appropriately,

it was from overeating.

And here's his tomb.

And as you can see, it's an amazing masterpiece.

And look at these little creatures,

the elaborate decoration, these arches.

Here are the good things in his life, the holy works,

and here is all the evil he overcame.

What you have up here,

in immaculate detail,

is a surprisingly slim-fit version of Frederick the Fat,

with all the accoutrements, the paraphernalia of power, the sword,

the shield, the sceptre.

Before he died, Frederick pulled off one last victory

for the House of Habsburg.

And it wasn't on a battlefield,

it was in the marriage chamber.

He married his son and heir, Maximilian, to Mary of Burgundy,

the richest heiress in Europe.

She was heiress to the Duchy of Burgundy,

that, in those days, contained the Netherlands, Belgium,

Luxembourg and swathes of Eastern France.

It would make the Habsburgs the greatest dynasty in Europe.

"Let others wage war," went the saying,

"But you, happy Austria, shall marry."

Maximilian's brilliant match to Mary of Burgundy

was just the first of the three weddings

that would raise Vienna from Germanic to world capital.

Maximilian was as gifted a warlord as he was a matchmaker.

Maximilian couldn't have been more different

from his flabby, sleepy father.

Or from the cliche

of the weak-chinned Habsburgs of the 19th century.

He was an exuberant, swaggering swashbuckler,

nicknamed the German Hercules.

"I laughed, I danced, I jousted, I paid court to the ladies,"

he wrote in his autobiography.

"But most of all, I just laughed wholeheartedly."

But his greatest achievements were in his marriage alliances.

First he married his son, Philip the Handsome,

to Juana of Spain,

daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella.

When they died, the Habsburgs inherited the Spanish Empire.

But Maximilian wasn't finished yet.

Towards the end of his life, in 1515,

Maximilian pulled off

a second astonishing marriage coup for the dynasty.

He married his grandchildren, his grandson, Ferdinand,

and his granddaughter, to the heirs to the Kingdoms of Hungary,

Bohemia and Croatia.

In an age of extremely high infant mortality,

even Maximilian couldn't have expected

all his marriage alliances to come good.

But as it happened,

he and the House of Habsburg were extremely lucky.

His marriage alliances delivered to the House of Habsburg

not only Spain, not only the Spanish Empire,

but also the thrones of Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia.

It would make the Habsburgs the greatest family empire

the world had ever known.

Maximilian was determined that his achievements would not go unnoticed.

He'd be aided in this mission by the invention of the printing press.

The Emperor Maximilian had used marriage alliances and war

to promote the House of Habsburg.

But now he was one of the first rulers

to use the new medium of printing

to project his majesty and magnificence.

And I'm here at the Albertina Museum to see how he did it.

These famous but rarely seen works are held in storage at this museum.

But they've offered to take them out and show them to us.

Christof Metzger is head of the Albertina's graphic art collection.

This is the first sheet.

And now you can make a sequence of altogether

more than 40 metres.

One of the largest ever made,

Maximilian's print depicts his travels around the empire.

But it's also meant to resemble the triumphal processions

of the Roman Emperors.

Just tell me about, you know, what was done with these -

these were printed and then sent around the Holy Roman Empire?

Yes, yes,

using the very, very modern medium of printing.

And if you want to have an impression how this has been made,

we have here the wood block of the artists of this procedure.

The detail is so intricate.

You fill it with ink, you cover it with ink,

you take a sheet of paper,

you put it on the coloured wood block...

..make a little pressure on it.

And afterwards, you have the final print.

This was the latest technology in 1518, or whatever,

it was like Twitter or Facebook today.

Yes. This was the new medium.

That's the new medium, and the first possibility, really,

to create art as a mass product.

Fascinating.

But there's also a colour version

of Maximilian's triumphal procession,

hand-drawn and hand-painted.

This has been the most precious version for the emperor,

and the imperial family.

The printed version was for

nearly everybody.

I think it's a thing of breathtaking beauty.

It's one of the greatest treasures in Vienna.

Am I right in saying that it's only been exhibited

about two or three times in 500 years?

Very, very rare occasions.

Can I look at it a bit more closely?

Yes, of course.

I'd just like to look at some of the detail on it.

I love this horse here, this caparisoned horse,

with these eagles on it.

Now, who is this?

These two horsemen introduce the carriage of the imperial family.

I think nothing really approaches the resplendent bling

of this gold-worked armour.

So moving this way, now we approach,

we suddenly see somebody very important is coming,

because look, there's one, two...

there's 12 horses... 12.

..each ridden by a postilion,

that are pulling a giant carriage.

And who is in this carriage?

Well, this is Maximilian himself, isn't it?

Let's look at him.

This is, in effect, the story we're about to tell.

So we have Maximilian, and then we have his son, Philip the Handsome,

who was married to Juana of Spain.

And there we see their children, the future Emperor Charles V,

and the future Emperor Ferdinand, his brother.

So, in effect,

this carriage contains the future destiny of the House of Habsburg,

and of Europe itself,

for the next 100 years.

Maximilian was ready to die.

He travelled everywhere with his own coffin

and he specified that on his death,

he was to be treated like a common sinner,

his teeth pulled out of his body, his hair shorn,

and his cadaver scourged with whips.

When he died, his heir was not his son,

Philip the Handsome, who'd predeceased him, but his grandson,

Charles V, who inherited all his vast domains.

But it was too much for any one man,

and so he brought his brother, Ferdinand,

who'd been brought up in Spain, speaking only Spanish,

and gave him the Austrian lands and Vienna.

From now on, this is Ferdinand's story.

In 1521, Ferdinand I became Archduke of Austria.

But when his brother-in-law,

the King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia,

was killed in battle by the Ottoman Turks,

he inherited those lands as well.

Ferdinand was now in charge of defending the entire eastern flank

of Christendom from the looming threat of the Ottomans and Islam.

The Sultan of the Ottomans was Suleiman I,

known to history as Suleiman the Magnificent.

In 1529 he marched on the city with an army of 300,000 men.

Ruling an empire that stretched from Iraq to Africa and the Balkans,

Suleiman the Magnificent saw himself as a Roman emperor,

an Islamic caliph and a Turkish sultan.

Now 35, in his prime, he'd already

taken the cities of Belgrade and Buda.

And he was advancing into Hungary,

defeating the Hungarians and

Bohemians and killing their young king.

This allowed Ferdinand to claim those thrones,

but it also started the duel between

the two greatest dynasties of their time,

the Ottomans versus the Habsburgs.

As he advanced on Vienna, this wasn't just a battle for a city,

it was a battle for Christendom and Europe itself.

Christendom was in peril.

In September, the Ottoman army camped right

here on the outskirts of Vienna.

Suleiman commanded the siege of Vienna from his tent,

pitched on this spot.

But he'd started late in the year -

winter was coming, supplies were low

and then his troops mutinied.

He'd never been defeated before,

and so he ordered a final assault on the city.

And when it failed, he reluctantly retreated.

Afterwards, the Habsburgs celebrated by building this palace on the site.

But it wasn't over.

This was the beginning of a titanic struggle that lasted 200 years.

But Islam wasn't the only threat to Vienna and the House of Habsburg.

Martin Luther had launched his protest against

papal abuses in Germany

and the Protestant Reformation of the church had now

spread into Bohemia as well.

Ferdinand went to war, and he managed to contain

the Protestant threat.

But his grandson didn't just compromise with Protestantism,

he actively encouraged religious diversity.

Crowned emperor in 1576,

his portrait hangs here in the Art History Museum.

This is Rudolf II,

the mercurial Holy Roman Emperor who ruled for 30 years.

And here you can see the exhaustion on his face.

But for three decades he had dazzled, amused

and worried all of Europe with his crazy antics.

He was known as Rudolf the Mad.

He had a court filled with necromancers, magicians, alchemists,

Jewish Kabbalists.

He wasn't interested in politics,

he was bored by religious politics which obsessed everybody else.

What interested him was collecting great art, a quest for beauty

and truth and magic.

He was a mystic. He was a collector.

He was a connoisseur.

Everything he did was extraordinary.

He had, for example, a pet tiger that wandered his castles,

occasionally eating his courtiers.

He loved boys, he loved girls, he fathered many bastards.

His sex life shocked everybody.

But he was always on the verge of madness.

Rudolf amassed one of the most impressive art collections in Europe

with works by Durer, Brueghel and the Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

The style of Rudolf's court painter

and impresario of court spectacles, Arcimboldo,

tells you a lot about the fantastical atmosphere

at Rudolf the Mad's court.

Arcimboldo loved to portray courtiers and even

royalty using everyday objects.

Here, this man's nose is a gherkin, for example.

His chin is a pear.

Arcimboldo's signature is in the straw.

His most famous painting is not kept in Vienna,

but in a museum in Sweden.

This is Arcimboldo's masterpiece. It is Rudolf II himself.

The emperor commissioned this. He loved it -

he had it hanging in his imperial bedchamber.

And he insisted that his own nose should appear as a pear.

He is Vertumnus, Roman god of fecundity and of fruit.

And that's how Rudolf saw himself.

But, you have to ask,

what to make of a Holy Roman Emperor who wanted himself portrayed

as a living fruit salad.

And his own family, the Habsburgs, were deeply unamused about this.

They didn't just regard him as a fruit salad, or a fruit cake,

for that matter. To them, his mysticism, his madness,

his tolerance of Protestantism made

him not just a nutter but more than that,

a danger to the dynasty, to God, to Christendom itself.

In 1609, Rudolf formally granted tolerance to

the Protestants of Bohemia.

For his family and the Pope, this was a step too far.

They began to plot against him.

In 1611, Rudolf's own brother Matthias overthrew him.

Rudolf died nine months later.

Although he saw himself as an advocate for religious tolerance,

his legacy had a dark side.

The Habsburg Empire was created by marriage,

and they tried to keep it together by intermarriage within the family.

But it wasn't long before these incestuous unions had started to

produce a few depraved psychopaths.

Rudolf the Mad's son, Don Julius, was even madder than his father.

Finally, he kidnapped a barber's daughter, dismembered her,

sliced off her ears, cut off her breasts

and was finally found cradling her earless head,

covered in his own blood and excrement.

Such were the macabre secrets of the house of Austria.

Matthias's rule was short lived.

But the same cannot be said for the Catholic fervour of the Habsburgs,

which now faced a new challenge from the Protestants of Prague,

just 180 miles to the north.

The age of tolerance was dead.

The Catholic counterreformation was on the march.

The new Habsburg monarch, Ferdinand II, was a religious bigot,

a Catholic zealot.

He revoked the tolerance of the

Protestants of Bohemia, and they rebelled.

The result was the Defenestration of Prague.

Every schoolboy's favourite,

defenestration means throwing someone out of the window.

And throwing people out of windows was a bit of a national pastime

in Bohemia. This was the second Defenestration of Prague.

Four of Ferdinand's Catholic

ministers were grabbed by the mob and tossed out of the window.

The drop was 70 feet.

Astonishingly, all four survived the fall.

To Ferdinand and the Catholics this was a miracle -

the Virgin Mary had intercepted them and softened their fall.

To the Protestants, they had simply survived by landing

in a heap of dung.

But Ferdinand celebrated by making one of the lords

Baron von Hohenfall,

Baron of the High Fall.

Nonetheless, Bohemia and the

Protestants were now in open rebellion.

This was war.

Ferdinand was determined to regain Bohemia.

He sent an army to march on Prague.

In 1620, Ferdinand and the Catholics

defeated the Protestants at the Battle of White Mountain.

And when he retook Prague, he unleashed a terrible revenge.

27 of the leading Protestant lords were tortured, dismembered,

executed in the main town square, their heads hung from meat hooks.

This was the beginning of the Thirty Years' War,

a savage religious war and a brutal tournament of power that ultimately

drew in most of the powers of Europe.

And for the Europeans themselves, it was a disaster.

Out of a population of around 78 million,

somewhere between three and 12 million perished.

That's as much as 15%.

This was a European catastrophe.

But war would be the making of one man, who seemed born for battle.

Albrecht Wenzel von Wallenstein was one of the greatest generals

the Habsburgs ever fielded.

And he was the ultimate over-mighty swaggering warlord

of the Thirty Years' War.

At the war's opening he offered himself with 100,000 men to

Emperor Ferdinand.

He thrashed all the emperor's enemies - Danes, Protestants,

Swedes, and became commander-in-chief.

But he forced the emperor to make him Duke of Friedland,

and amassed a vast, personal fiefdom.

Soon he was even threatening the emperor himself.

Ferdinand now feared that Wallenstein wouldn't rest until he

dominated all of Central Europe.

In 1634, Ferdinand gathered together in Vienna a tribunal that condemned

Wallenstein was a traitor.

He was to be brought back to Vienna, dead or alive.

The hit squad was a group of Irish dragoons under an Irishman,

Walter Butler. First they burst into the tavern where Wallenstein's

entourage and henchmen were asleep. They murdered them all.

And then, finally, burst into Wallenstein's own bedroom.

As he lay in bed, they ran him through with a halberd,

and there died, bled out on the bed in some remote lodgings,

the greatest general of the Thirty Years' War.

The warlord who had dared to challenge the emperor himself.

But this was not just a war fought by generals on battlefields.

The Thirty Years' War was also a battle for hearts and minds.

Ferdinand II recruited the Jesuits, the holy order,

as soldiers in his army of Christ.

They provided his top advisers,

the tutors for the heir to the throne, they ran the university,

they took over education.

And as the cloisters took over the corridors of power,

the joke went like this -

Austria, Osterreich, had become Cl-Osterreich.

In Austria, the Counter-Reformation

became known as the Klosteroffensive.

It would transform the character of the city.

Ferdinand himself founded this Jesuit church

in the old university quarter of Vienna.

In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia

finally ended the ruinous Thirty Years' War.

In wider Europe, there was a compromise between the Catholics and

Protestants. But within the Austrian monarchy,

it marked the total victory of Catholicism.

And that confidence, that exuberance,

that supremacy of Catholicism, is expressed here in this church.

Its interior was remodelled in opulent Baroque style by an Italian

architect and stage designer, Andrea Pozzo.

The ceiling is a fine example of a trompe-l'oeil,

creating the optical illusion of a domed roof.

And Pozzo's background in stage design is apparent

in the inclusion of these theatrical boxes on the first floor.

Positioning the Habsburgs as champions of Catholicism,

Ferdinand laid the foundation stone for the family Imperial Crypt.

We've been given exclusive access to this wonderful,

if somewhat eerie place.

When a Habsburg emperor died, his funeral cortege would come here,

to the Capuchin Chapel to the Kaisergruft, the Emperor's Crypt.

The doors would be locked, and they would knock on the doors and say,

"This is the Emperor. The King of Bohemia."

And they would list all his other many, many titles, a page long.

"We recognise no-one of that name," they would reply.

So they would knock again and this time,

they would give a shorter version.

And again they would reply, "We know of no-one of that name."

And finally, they would knock for the third time.

"Who goes there?" they would say.

And the cortege would answer,

"A penitent sinner."

And then they would open the door.

That was how Habsburgs were buried.

But in spite of their supposed humility in death,

the Habsburgs were still buried

in these ornate metal sarcophagi, decorated with skulls,

but also with their many crowns.

And that's the point. This was all an act.

It was all a show.

A Habsburg emperor lived and died as an emperor.

Educated by the Jesuits and originally intended for the church,

Ferdinand's grandson, Leopold I,

was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1658.

The new young emperor, Leopold I, was no beauty.

Even by the standards of Habsburg interbreeding,

he was possessed of the most ginormous jaw

in the whole history of the family.

Wits at court meanly nicknamed him Schweinemund von Habsburg.

The Hog Mouth of Habsburg.

In a 50-year rule, he endured disasters and he endured glories.

He was endearing. He was sweet.

He was untalented but he loved music. He lived for music.

He was a consummate if conventional composer.

His tragedy was that he wrote the requiems for both of his dead wives.

His first wife was a toddler when she was betrothed to him.

An extraordinary story is told in a series of portraits that hang in the

Art History Museum.

This is Margarita Teresa, a child who is the Infanta of Spain.

And from the age of about three, she was destined to marry her uncle,

Leopold I, Emperor in Austria, in Vienna.

And this was just another example of the insane,

and ultimately disastrous policy of

the Habsburg marrying their relatives.

She was not only his niece, both her parents were also Habsburgs,

so they were related on many levels.

And because she was far away in Madrid, and she had to grow up,

the court painter in Spain, Velazquez,

was commissioned to paint her every two or three years.

Here's the first painting.

Here in the second painting she is at five.

And here she is, the third one, at eight.

The actual marriage took place when she was 15.

And when they were married, and they were husband and wife,

she always called her husband "Uncle."

In the summer of 1666,

Margarita Teresa finally travelled to Vienna and

their marriage took place in December that year.

Leopold celebrated his wedding with a giant allegorical spectacular here

at the Hofburg. Life-size ships, horses, carriages

hovered above the lake.

Two 60-foot mountains, Etna and Parnassus,

spurted forth fire like volcanoes.

And the climax came when Leopold

himself excitedly lit 70,000 fireworks

that illuminated the sky above Vienna,

spelling out the letters A, E, I, O, U.

Austria dominates the world.

For days, the entire city was given over

to a series of baroque spectaculars,

including a four-hour equestrian ballet.

Rudi Risatti is one of the curators

of an exhibition of baroque spectacle

at the Vienna Theatre Museum.

He's made an animated film from original period prints of the

horse ballet, performed in the Hofburg Square.

Rudi, tell me about the special effects of the 17th century.

How on earth did they get these life-size

carriages to seem to float on water?

They tried through means of illusion to create wonderful images in the

three-dimensional space.

So, for example, in the horse ballet you saw

different wagons and chariots moved by the

force of horses, etc.

The water was not real water,

it was just a combination of different fabrics and painted parts.

Tell me about other spectaculars that Leopold put on.

A second big event confirming the power of the court

was the opera Il Pomo D'oro,

for which Leopold I composed some parts.

When the Habsburg monarchy was almost bankrupt,

why did they spend so much on these spectacular extravaganzas?

Spectacular and theatrical events

were being made just to show the power of the dynasty.

To finance these extravagant displays of power,

Leopold had to borrow from Jewish moneylenders.

They'd finally been allowed to return to Vienna,

though only permitted to settle outside the city walls

on the other side of the Danube.

But now, influenced by the rabid anti-Semitism of his young wife,

Leopold would turn against them

and they were expelled from the city.

Their synagogue was destroyed and Leopold built a church on its site.

Soon after the Jewish expulsion,

the city was blighted by an outbreak of bubonic plague

that claimed over 70,000 lives

and severely weakened its garrison.

This didn't go unnoticed by a resurgent Ottoman Empire.

Its grand vizier, or prime minister,

was the ferociously ambitious Kara Mustafa,

and he finally persuaded his sultan that the time was right

to once again attempt to take Vienna.

In July, 1683, the Ottoman army,

200,000 strong and under the command of Kara Mustafa himself,

arrived beneath the walls of Fortress Vienna.

As the Ottomans besieged the city,

they started to mine underneath the bastions and walls of its defences.

This is one of the last city walls that still exists.

Day by day they slowly, but systematically,

blew up bastion after bastion,

wall after wall, until they were almost ready to storm the city.

If relief didn't come soon, Vienna would fall.

Leopold was chiefly concerned with saving his own skin

and he fled to Linz, more than 100 miles away.

En route he was jeered and spat at by peasants.

Leopold and the Pope implored Christian kings to join

a holy league to defend the embattled city.

And their call was heard.

The leader of the Holy Alliance was King Jan Sobieski of Poland.

He was the classic beau sabreur and knight who'd fought in many armies

across Europe.

He'd also been to many foreign capitals, Paris -

he was a man of culture.

He'd married a beautiful French wife.

He was hugely overweight,

but he could still stay in the saddle for 12 or 15 hours at a time.

He knew that if Vienna fell, Poland would be next.

And that's why he led his 3,000 famous Polish hussars

in their leopard skins and tiger skins to rescue Vienna.

Sobieski assembled his army here, in the Vienna Woods,

and on the 12th of September, 1683,

they began to fight their way towards Vienna.

The battle raged from dawn till dusk,

until eventually the Christian forces were ready

for the final charge.

King Jan Sobieski, now joined by the Bavarian and Saxon contingents,

led 18,000 cavalrymen thundering down the hill into the Turkish camp.

It's said it's the biggest cavalry charge in history.

The Turks fled.

Kara Mustafa had given orders that his favourite concubine and his pet

ostrich must not fall into enemy hands.

In the grand vizier's opulent tent,

headless girl and headless bird were found side-by-side.

BELL TOLLS

It was a victory for Christ, it was a victory for Vienna.

The bells of Saint Stephen's rang out in joyful celebration.

King Jan Sobieski, by right, should have waited for

Emperor Leopold to return before he entered his city.

But the old swashbuckler just couldn't resist it

and he galloped on into Vienna.

When Leopold finally did return,

there was a frosty meeting between the two monarchs.

Leopold thanked him half-heartedly.

"It was a pleasure to perform this small service for you,"

replied the Polish king sardonically.

Then he left for Poland.

But Leopold commandeered the victory for the dynasty.

It was the making of the House of Habsburg.

Kara Mustafa had failed in his great enterprise,

much of it due to his own incompetence.

And he would pay the price.

When the Sultan's deaf-mutes, his traditional executioners,

arrived, Kara Mustafa knew why they had come.

He bared his neck, "It is God's will," he said.

They strangled him with their bowstring,

and then beheaded him and sent the head to the Sultan.

But for Vienna, and for the House of Habsburg,

it was a new beginning, a new era.

The Austrian Habsburgs became a great power in their own right

for the first time.

They struck east against the Ottomans,

west against the mighty French.

The empire was striking back,

and Vienna would enter upon its own golden age.

In the next 100 years, Vienna would see an extraordinary

flourishing of the arts and the

construction of some of the world's most spectacular palaces.

This is one of the glories of 18th-century Vienna.

No wonder it's called Belvedere - look at this view.

And Vienna would inspire, perhaps, the most brilliant composer of all,

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

I would say he was a rock star!

But it would also come under threat from one of history's greatest

conquerors, Napoleon Bonaparte.

What makes Vienna the imperial city it is today?

Find out more through the Open University's interactive map

of landmarks, language and stories

by heading to bbc.co.uk/vienna

and following the links to the Open University.