Wien

Under the Luxembourgs Vienna stood in the shadow of Prague, and Rudolf IV, called the Founder, set out to match it: in 1365 he founded the University of Vienna on the Prague model and began the Gothic nave of St Stephen's. In 1485 Matthias Corvinus of Hungary took the city and held it until he died there in 1490. Only after Bohemia and Hungary had passed to the Habsburgs did Vienna become the emperors' permanent seat, in 1558. By then Luther's teaching had won over most of its burghers, but from 1551 Ferdinand I brought in the Jesuits, who took over the university, and by the 1640s hardly a Protestant was left.

The real danger lay barely 150 kilometres to the east, on the Ottoman frontier in Hungary. Suleiman's siege of 1529 failed and left Vienna with modern bastions, and in 1683 those walls held for two months until a relief army under Jan Sobieski of Poland broke the second siege. With the Turks driven back, the city was rebuilt in Baroque style and filled with the palaces of the court nobility, and by the end of the 18th century it was the city of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.