The earliest Austrian walled towns started to appear in the late 11th century to the early 13th century. Their establishment was closely connected with the development of Austria as a march of the Holy Roman Empire and in particular by the Hohenstaufen emperors and their Marcher Lords, the Babenbergs.Monika Porsche: Stadtmauer und Stadtentstehung - Untersuchungen zur frühen Stadtbefestigung im mittelalterlichen Deutschen Reich. - Hertingen, 2000, for evidence of the earliest walled towns of the Holy Roman Empire in the Rhinelands. In present-day Austria, there are 106 towns or cities that were walled.Klaar, A. "Burgenkarte" Ausstellung Romanische Kunst in Oesterreich. Krems, 1964, pp. 276–282 The walls of Radstadt, Freiburg, Hainburg and Drosendorf survive almost intact, and Austria has some of the most impressive walled towns in Europe.Other cities or towns such as Vienna, Salzburg and St Pölten have had their defences almost obliterated. In Austria, the procedure for granting civic status or creating a Stadt was relatively simple. Initially, a local lord or official ministerialis could petition for market rights (Marktrecht), after that, the town would be laid out by a surveyor and it would have been surrounded by an earthen-banked enclosure surmounted with a vertical wooden palisade. Often a stone gatehouse (Tor) would be built for the collection of custom dues from traders coming to the market. When a town was granted a charter or borough rights (Stadtrecht), in most cases, a wall was being built or provision for its construction and financing were included in the charter.Cord Meckseper Kleine Kunstgeschichte die Deutschen Stadt im Mittelalter, Darmstadt, 1982, provides a useful guide to "Stadt" formation, particularly pp 65-88, which surveys the Stauffenberg foundations
Types of town wall and layout
Towns with Roman fortifications
These include towns with Roman defences that were re-fortified in the 12th and 13th centuries, which formed part of the Roman limes, which were to the south of the Danube.G Alfoldy "Noricum" Routledge and Kegan Paul; Provinces of the Roman Empire, London 1974, provides much background information in the area along the Danube which fell within the province of Noricum, but this must be updated by recent archaeological discoveries, particularly in Salzburg, Mautern and Tulln These include the Flavian (late 1st century AD) auxiliary forts at Mautern, Traismauer, Tulln, possibly Pochlarn, and the Legionary fortress at Vienna.
At Traismauer, the medieval defences almost exactly correspond with the rectangular auxiliary fort, while at Mautern the walls match the auxiliary fort together with the 3rd century extension to the north side. But at Tulln and Vienna, the medieval walled area was larger than the Roman fort. The walls of Roman towns were also incorporated into later town walls at Linz, St. Pölten and Wels. The site of the Roman municipium of Luvarum (in Salzburg) underlies most of the Altstadt (old city). In the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Valentinian I re-organised the Roman defences along the Danube by building a series of watchtowers or "Burgi", which were sometimes built into earlier fortifications. It is now recognised that the large bastion-shaped tower at Mautern is not medieval, but Roman. There are also similar Roman towers attached to the walls at Traismauer and Tulln.
Towns with an ovoid defensive enclosure
This form of town is best illustrated by a 17th-century print by Georg Matthäus Vischer of Schwanenstadt in Upper Austria. He shows the town with a long rectangular marketplace at the ends of which stone gate-towers were set into the earthen palisaded bank. Amstetten in Lower Austria is very similar and some of the earthen bank survives, but instead of a rectangular marketplace it has the early spindle-shaped form. In Upper Austria and the Tyrol, this form of layout can be associated with the early Bavarian settlers who started to establish themselves in the 7th century. Other examples of these towns, such as Braunau and Hall, have been modified by the building of later castles. Under Charlemagne, the Bavarians moved eastwards down the Danube and into modern Hungary. The original defensive layout of Korneuburg, to the north of Vienna, is almost ovoid in plan and predates the internal street grid layout, which dates from around 1298."Lechner", 359 Zistersdorf, close to the Slovakian border, also has an ovoid layout, modified by the building of the later castle. Both Schwanenstadt and Zistersdorf have large and important Germanic cemeteries that have been recently excavated, suggesting that they were early settlements.Gojda M The Ancient Slavs: Settlement and Society, Edinburgh University Press 1991, 44ff, discusses similar early settlements in Bohemia and Moravia
Early walled towns
From the 10th century, following the defeat of the Magyars at the battle of Lechfeld in 955, the Bavarians started to establish themselves around Melk and Herzogenburg in Lower Austria in the so-called "Kernland". In 976 Leopold I of Babenberg became the first margave of the "Ostmark" of the Holy Roman Empire and the first reference to "Ostarrîchi" occurs in 996, which gives Austria its name. Leopold, his son Henry I and his grandson Adalbert, expanded their territory into the Wienerwald in the east up to the Hungarian border. Under the Babenberg Ernest the Brave (1055–1075) sees the appearance of Hadmar I and the Kuenringer family, a family of imperial officials or "ministerialis" who played an important part in the colonisation of the Waldviertel. The Kuenringer worked closely with Leopold II (1075–1095) who moved his main residence from Melk to Gars am Kamp. It seems likely that the first widespread construction of stone walls for towns starts in the late 12th century or early 13th century. The Kuenringers established five towns, Dürnstein, Zwettl, Weitra, Waidhofen an der Thaya and Zistersdorf, the first four of which survive today as remarkably well preserved examples of walled towns. The Kuenringers also held Litschau from 1237 to 1297 and may have been responsible for the walls of this town as well.Folker Riechart Zur Geschichte und inneren Struktur der Kuenringstädte, Kustenig A and Weltin M "Kuenringer-Forschungen", Wien 1981. pp. 142–187.
Promontory towns Promontory styled walled towns can take two forms, either a wall is made across the constricted neck of a looped bend in a river, or on a raised spur of land at the point where one river enters another river at an acute angle. Towns of both types tend to be more common in the Czech Republic than in Austria, and Český Krumlov town on the Vltava is a classic example of the first type. Leoben is another example but is a rectangular town with a grid plan layout that has been placed across a bend in a river.Mecksher 266, Z76 Examples of promontory forts between two rivers occur at Drosendorf on the Thaya, close to the Bohemian border and has a typical promontory layout, suggesting that it is of Slavic origin. Judenburg in Styria is another example of this type of walled town.
Rectangular frontier trading towns This is a small group of towns which were established to facilitate trade on the existing frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire or between the margraves of its marches. The walled towns form a rectangular shape, and cover a greater area than other early walled towns. An example is Wiener Neustadt, one of the earliest towns in Austria to have been granted Stadtrecht, it was a new town laid out after 1192 by the Babenberg Duke Leopold V of Austria, following his acquisition of the Duchy of Styria. Silver paid in 1194 from the ransom of Richard the Lionhart was used to finance the building of the walls.Gillingham, John, Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century, 1994, The defences of Wiener Neustadt are rectangular, measuring 600 by 680 metres. Granted a charter in 1210 the town lies on the historic boundary between the Duchy of Styria and Hungarian Kingdom.Gertrud Gerhartl Österreichischer Städteatlas Band 2 1985
Other examples are Freistadt, in Upper Austria, which was on the border with Bohemia, Retz and Laa an der Thaya in Lower Austria, and Moravia. Marchegg, which was on the borders with both Moravia and Hungary, was established by the Bohemian King Ottokar II, but when he was defeated and killed in 1268 by Duke Rudolf at the nearby battle of Durnkrut, the town continued to be laid-out and walled by the Archduke. It probably covered the greatest area of any early walled towns, but Marchegg was not successful. Even today a large area of the enclosed town has never been built on. Within the Hungarian Kingdom and particularly present day Slovakia, reciprocal trading towns such as Trnava, were built.
Composite and double towns Composite towns take two forms. A town may grow and show signs of being progressively extended and then being surrounded by a wall, or it may have a number of separate entities and a degree of separate governance, but is regarded as a unit and in most cases has a single charter. Examples of "double towns" are Krems and Stein. Stein has 9th-century origins as a customs collection centre on the Danube, and was probably walled in the early 13th century. It is immediately adjacent to Krems, which is equally as old. In 1305, a joint charter was granted to both towns as "Krems und Stein". Klosterneuburg and Korneuburg started as double towns on both sides of the Danube but were then split by Duke Albrecht in the late 13th century. Murau is an example of two linked settlements on either side of a river. Herzogenburg consisted of two towns with a joint charter.
Smaller settlements with walled defenses
There also were smaller settlements, market towns and villages with defenses, which might collectively be described as Stadtchen. These occur particularly in Burgenland, but also in Styria, and East Tyrol. They are primarily defenses against Turkish incursions and marauding Hungarian brigands. These walled and defended settlements were mainly constructed in the period between the first siege of Vienna in 1529 and the second siege in 1683. In 1622 the Esterhazy family succeeded to the control of the area around Eisenstadt (the modern Burgenland) and in light of the threats from the Turks and the marauding Hungarian groups, started fortification of the larger villages and settlements. At Oggau am Neusiedler See, the walls may have started to be built earlier following the Bocskay rebellion in 1605, which had left the small market town devastated. Other settlements in Burgenland to be walled were Rust, (which together with the Altstadt at Eisenstadt) which were now given the special status of "Royal Free Cities" and Purbach and Donnerskirchen. The four settlements – Oggau am Neusiedler See, Purbach, Rust and Donnerskirchen – formed a defended group along the western edge of the Neusiedler See. Around 1640 probably all of these settlements had angled bastions added to the walls for mounted artillery.
Tabor and fortified villages
At Feldbach in Styria in the 17th century, a fortified group of houses known as the Tabor were built round the church, with an outer group of houses with inset gates, to counter Hungarian brigands.Herwig Ebner: Die steirischen Tabore. In: Mitteilungen der Kommission für Burgenforschung 4 (1955), S. 292-309 There were also similar Tabor buildings constructed around the church at nearby Gleisdorf, which capitulated to the Turks in 1532 and also another one at Frohnleiten.