Burg Wiener Neustadt

The Georgenberg Handfeste of 1192 brought the duchy of Styria to the Babenbergs, who meant to secure the frontier with the Hungarian kingdom by founding a fortified town. The capital came from the ransom Duke Leopold V had taken for the English king Richard the Lionheart, and it paid for the Nova Civitas, the new town that took the prefix Wiener only in the seventeenth century. The first castle went up in 1193 and 1194, at the same time as the city walls. It is said to have stood on the north-eastern corner of the town, though no archaeological evidence of it has been found.

When that first castle became too small, a new one was raised on the present site by Leopold VI the Glorious at the beginning of the thirteenth century, on wooden piles because the ground there is marshy. Under Frederick II the Quarrelsome it was finally surrounded by a moat, outer walls and towers, and in his years of rule, from 1230 to 1246, a citadel with four towers went up at the south-eastern corner of the town. In 1246 the Battle of the Leitha was fought east of the castle and Frederick II was killed; a monument on the Burgenland road still recalls it. The fortification is first mentioned in a document of 1260. The wall had been taken down under Otakar II of Bohemia by 1253 and was built up again in the late thirteenth century.

Earthquakes in 1348 and 1356 destroyed the Babenberg castle, which collapsed in the first of them; remains of its walls survive in the cellar vaults. Leopold III of Habsburg had it rebuilt, the larger new building beginning in 1378, and the surviving keystone in the former chapel vault of the east wing carries the year 1379.

On a terrace built over the tomb chapel of Leopold IV, Peter Pusika raised the Gottsleichnamkapelle, God's Body Chapel, for Duke Ernest the Iron, and later, for Emperor Frederick III, St George's Chapel in the newly created west wing. Built between 1440 and 1460, it had begun as St Mary's or Our Lady's Chapel and was renamed under Frederick III, who gave it to the Knights of the Order of St George as their seat.

The town and its castle had their best years in the fifteenth century, when the castle served Frederick III as a residence for decades at a stretch. The heraldic Wappenwand dates from that time, and the castle then had four corner towers. In many places the inscription A.E.I.O.U., which goes back to Frederick III, can still be found. The swampy ground between the town and the Leitha was drained under him, and the animal park he laid out south of the castle was enclosed between 1446 and 1465 by a wall of nearly six kilometres, the Zeiselmauer or long wall.

When Frederick III refused to give up the guardianship of Ladislaus the Posthumous, the Mailberg Confederation formed against him and an army of the Estates, sixteen thousand strong, laid siege to the castle in 1452. Negotiations ended the siege and Frederick surrendered his ward. He then founded the Order of St George and made the castle available as the order's seat, an arrangement that was repealed in 1598.

In 1486 Matthias Corvinus besieged the castle again, and after two years the defenders surrendered. The occupying troops were driven out of castle and town after Corvinus died in 1490. Frederick III's son, the future Emperor Maximilian I, had been born in the castle, and under him it lost the status of a permanent residence and became no more than a retreat of the emperor. Maximilian was buried in St George's in 1519, beneath the steps of the high altar, although a tomb had already been built for him in the court church at Innsbruck.

In 1521 Archduke Ferdinand, later Emperor Ferdinand I, withdrew to the castle in the face of resistance from the Protestant estates. The Vienna city government was then arrested, tried and executed here, in the proceedings remembered as the Wiener Neustädter Blutgericht, the Wiener Neustadt bloody trial. One of the castle towers was adapted as a state prison, the Rákócziturm, and held detainees including Francis II Rákóczi and Peter, Count Zrin.

The castle was attacked but not taken during the first Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529, which left heavy damage behind it; in the second siege of 1683 it was not attacked at all. Fires did major damage in 1608 and again in 1616. In 1743 fourteen hundred French prisoners of war were held in the castle, and a little later a plague-like epidemic broke out which claimed many victims. The castle was kept shut for two years after the survivors were withdrawn, for fear of infection, and thereafter was hardly used and fell into neglect.

In 1751 Empress Maria Theresa founded the Theresian Military Academy and established it in the castle. On 14 December that year she assigned the building to her noble cadet house, which was to train up to two hundred officer cadets. The numerous alterations this required were carried out by the Viennese master builder Matthias Gerl, and the cadet house began work on 11 November 1752.

An earthquake in 1768 damaged the castle so severely that the building became uninhabitable. It was rebuilt to plans by the master builder Nikolaus Pacassi and adapted to the needs of a modern training establishment. Three of the four towers had to be taken down, new rooms for the emperor were fitted out in the east wing, the main staircase was put in where God's Body Chapel had stood, and the west portal was created. From 1777 to 1945 the fabric then remained practically unchanged. The academy closed after the First World War and reopened in 1934.

In the bombing at the end of the Second World War, in 1944 and 1945, the castle was so badly damaged, along with the city as a whole, that only the outer walls were left standing; aerial bombs, fires and looting between them all but destroyed it. The ruin was restored to its historic form between 1946 and 1959, keeping the historic foundation walls where that was possible, while the division of rooms inside was adapted to modern use. The military academy was able to resume operations in 1958.

Very little of St George's survived either, and only one pillar remained original. The church was rebuilt after 1945 using white sandstone from the Kaisersteinbruch quarry. The former bishop's see had been moved to St Pölten in 1784; in 1963 Wiener Neustadt became the seat of the military bishop, and in 1987, under military bishop Alfred Kostelecky, the church was raised to the rank of cathedral. Since 1990 the military bishop of Austria has held the bishopric dissolved in 1784 as a titular see.

The castle, which had always been the sovereign's property, belongs to the Republic of Austria and is a listed monument. It remains the home of the Theresian Military Academy and, in spite of that military purpose, can be visited through an exhibition created in 2019. The academy park has been open to the public since Maria Theresa.