Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      But with the Carolingian dynasty came a new era. Charles Martel, Pepin and Charlemagne aspired to universal monarchy. Not content with France, Northern Spain, Italy and Germany proper, Charlemagne, as we have already seen, recaptured the middle Danube. His successors in Germany, the Saxon, Franconian and Swabian emperors, continued the impulse, but gave it in the main a different direction. Instead of moving toward the south-east, where they would have encountered stubborn opposition from the already compact Hungarian nationality, they chose for their field of colonization (or recolonization) the east and north-east. Throughout the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we observe a strong and unremitting tide of German peasants, burghers and knights flowing through and over Brandenburg, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Silesia, the Prussian duchies, and even into Lithuania, Curland, Livonia and Esthonia. We have here an explanation of the want of interest taken by the Germans in the Crusades. While the kings of England and France, the barons and counts of Brabant and Italy, were wasting their substance and the blood of their subjects in hopeless attempts to overthrow Mohammedanism on its own ground, the Germans were laying the foundations—unconsciously, it is true—of a new empire. The lands wrested from the Slaves were to be the kingdom of Frederick the Great. The work was done thoroughly, almost as thoroughly as the Saxon conquest of Britain. The Obotrites, Wiltzi, Ukern, Prussians, Serbs and Vends were annihilated or absorbed. The only traces of their existence now to be found are the scattered remnants of dialects spoken in remote villages or small districts, and the countless names of towns bequeathed by them to their conquerors. These names are often recognizable by the СКАЧАТЬ