Hofburg Palace

Building began in the first half of the 13th century under the Babenbergs - Duke Leopold VI, who died in 1230, is said to have laid the foundation stone - and was finished around 1275 under Ottokar II Premysl of Bohemia. The castle was a square with four corner towers, a gate tower, a ditch and a drawbridge, built into Vienna's fortifications rather than set apart from them. It enters the record in 1279 under the Habsburg king Rudolf I.

Albrecht I had a late-Romanesque chapel raised there around 1287/88, first recorded in 1296. Albrecht V enlarged it between 1423 and 1426; its roof timber dates from 1421, the year he ordered a large-scale persecution of Vienna's Jews and probably the year Jewish gravestones were set into the chapel's foundations, from which they were later removed to a Jewish cemetery. Frederick III rebuilt it in Gothic form between 1447 and 1449, and it served as the court's parish church until the monarchy ended in 1918.

Ferdinand I had agreed with his brother Charles V, in the Worms partition treaty of 1521 and the Brussels treaty of 1522, to take over government of the Habsburg hereditary lands. In the middle of the 16th century he moved his main residence to Vienna and had the Gothic castle rebuilt in Renaissance style, keeping Innsbruck as a second seat while Inner Austria was administered from Graz. From 1438 to 1583, and again from 1612 to 1806, the palace was the seat of the Habsburg kings and emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, and thereafter, until 1918, of the emperors of Austria.

Turkish armies had besieged the city in 1529, and Ferdinand rebuilt the approach behind heavier defences: Pietro Ferrabosco raised the red-and-black Swiss Gate in 1552, painted with Ferdinand's titles and the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece; behind it are the treasuries holding the Reichskleinodien of the Holy Roman Empire and the insignia of the Austrian empire. Ferdinand built the Stallburg for his heir Maximilian, whom he is said to have refused to keep under his own roof because the young man leaned towards Protestantism.

The Leopoldine Wing, joining the Swiss Court to the Amalienburg, went up in the 1660s under Leopold I to designs by Filiberto Lucchese, built by Carl Martin and Domenico Carlone, its façade, cornices, stair steps and portal cut from hard Kaiserstein quarried at Kaisersteinbruch. After the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 Giovanni Pietro Tencalla rebuilt it and added a storey; the Amalienburg opposite, begun in 1575 for the future Rudolf II and completed in stages by 1611, gained a half-storey in the same campaign of 1683/84.

Ludovico Ottavio Burnacini's 1,000-seat court theatre, which had opened on 12 July 1668 with Cesti's Il pomo d'oro, was dismantled after the siege and later rebuilt, remaining the court company's main venue into the 1860s and 1870s.

Charles VI founded the Court Library on the far side of the complex; Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach began it and his son Joseph Emanuel finished it in 1735. Its Prunksaal holds Prince Eugene of Savoy's books under a ceiling fresco by Daniel Gran.

In 1769 the weight of the books threatened to bring the building down. Maria Theresa and Joseph II had it strengthened under Nicolaus Pacassi, whose work also opened the Josefsplatz and joined the library to the Augustinian church - the Habsburg court church, where Franz Joseph I married Elisabeth and where 54 hearts of the house are kept in silver urns behind an iron door.

Maria Theresa turned the 17th-century opera house into the Redoutensaele, named for the French redoute, or masked ball. Beethoven's Eighth Symphony was first performed there in 1814, and the saying that the Congress dances comes from the balls held in those halls during the Congress of Vienna of 1814/15, when Tsar Alexander I lodged in the Amalienburg. In the Hall of Ceremonies, built for Francis II/I by the Belgian architect Louis Montoyer, Napoleon I asked for the hand of the emperor's daughter Marie Louise.

In 1809 part of the old bastion beside the palace was demolished during the Napoleonic Wars, and within new walls of 1817 Peter von Nobile designed the Burgtor. In the revolutionary year of 1848 the first Austrian parliament sat in the Winter Riding School. After the city walls came down in the 1860s the palace had its last great expansion: an Imperial Forum planned by Gottfried Semper and then Karl von Hasenauer, reaching across the Ring Road with the twin museums as its flanks. The museums were finished by 1891, but costs rose and no real function could be found for the scheme; the Neue Burg was completed in 1913 and the forum never was.

In the Privy Council Room of the Leopoldine Wing, on 28 June 1900, Archduke Franz Ferdinand swore the Oath of Renunciation, giving up all claim to the throne for his descendants because his intended marriage was morganatic. The monarchy ended in 1918, and from 1923 to 1939 the German Club - German-national and later National Socialist in tendency, counting President Michael Hainisch and at least fifteen interwar ministers among its members - held eight rooms of that wing. On 15 March 1938 Adolf Hitler proclaimed the Anschluss from the balcony of the Neue Burg over Heldenplatz.

Since the end of 1946 the Leopoldine Wing has held the offices of the federal president and his chancellery. Parts of the palace opened as a convention centre in September 1958, run at first by the Burghauptmannschaft, an office in existence since the Middle Ages. Fire badly damaged the Redoute Wing on 27 November 1992; the halls reopened in 1998 after five years of restoration, and in 2017 were fitted out for the National Council and the Federal Council while the parliament building was restored.