Chapter 61 - Klingenbach History, Pt. 5 ... Baroque Era

So now we come to Klingenbach in 1600. The village is under the rule of the Austrian monarchy but still perilously close to the Ottoman Empire.

Europe in 1600


During the next 150 to 200 years, it's just one war after another. There were so many wars it's hard to keep track, including the Thirty Years War during which civilian loss of life approached 50% due to starvation and epidemics. There were also wars concerning the Austrian, Spanish, Polish and Bavarian Successions - I guess they took it real seriously who succeeded the throne in other countries. Some other wars had names like the Third Dutch War, War of the League of Augsburg, campaigns that returned Hungary to Austrian control, the Seven Years War and several wars against the Turks (more about that later). The result of all those wars was a lot of dead people and Austria losing some territories and gaining more.

The Baroque Era dated from around 1600 to the mid to late 1700s. It was marked by elaborate symmetrical ornamentation. As one art historian has said, it was "ornate, intricate, decorated, detailed, complex and beautiful."

A Baroque Era Room


The era was also marked by elaborate clothes - in the nobility of course. None of us want to see peasant smocks again.


The era succeeded the Renaissance, but painters kept turning out beautiful works of art. This is Caravaggio's "Calling of St. Matthew" - 1600


Even the soldiers were fancy. Here is a Hungarian Hussar in 1600.


It was also an era of strong female rulers. The greatest of them all, Elizabeth I of England, died in 1603 at the beginning of the era. But there were many others, notably Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Catherine the Great of Russia.

Highly educated Catherine the Great (1729-1796) of Russia (originally from a German duchy) embraced her new country and religion. She had what can only be charitably called a chaotic private life. As a queen, however, few could match her. To begin with, she may or may not have participated in the conspiracy to depose her weakling husband. As Czarina, she reorganized government, modernized Russia, furthered arts and literature and conducted a complex foreign policy.

Catherine the Great


Here are two of the many women rulers in Central Europe during this era. Of course they derived their power from dead husbands. I display these two because they lived and died at the exact same time but were so different in their attitudes and accomplishments.

Princess Regnant Katharina von Brandenburg of Transylvania (1602-44) encouraged education and was very tolerant of different faiths. She tolerated all religions in her realm.


Regent Dowager Archduchess Claudia De Medici of Tirol [southern Austria] (1604-48) reorganized the army and led Tirol during the Thirty Years War, promoted trade and law and order. But although she limited the persecution of witches, she was adamant about religion - Protestants were not allowed in her country.


I find Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) of Austria the most fascinating woman because she was different from other female rulers in Europe. (I have more about her in Blog #26.) She was the only female and least inbred Habsburg ruler, but let's admit one basic truth - if she'd had a surviving brother, she would have been only a footnote in history. As it was she was poorly educated and ill-prepared to rule. Her husband - one of the few love matches in royal European history - helped her, and she eventually became a strong ruler in her own right, instituting many reforms like compulsory schooling for boys and girls. She promoted commerce, developed agriculture, reorganized the military and was extremely religiously intolerant. Of her 16 children, 11 grew to adulthood. She was an inconsistent mother, heavily critical of all except one daughter. After her husband's death, she sank into perpetual grief and never again wore anything but black. But the improvements she instituted led to the preeminence of Austria in central Europe for 200 years.

Maria Theresa as a young girl


Bubonic plague epidemics continued to ravage Europe in the centuries after the Black Death in 1347-50. A particularly virulent epidemic decimated central Europe in the late 1670s to early 1680s. It hit Vienna in 1679, but it's impossible to get accurate statistics. My research states the number of deaths as somewhere between 75,000 and 150,000 in a population variably described as between 50,000 and 175,000. The point is a whole bunch of people died, and the king erected a monument thanking God for their deliverance.

Plague Column (Pestsaule) in Vienna


The biggest problem for central Europeans was the Ottoman Turk Empire. For centuries they continued to invade Christian Europe with persistence and determination. By 1683 they had conquered the Balkans and much of southeastern Europe. They were dangerously close to Vienna.

Ottoman Empire - 1683


The final siege of Vienna was in 1683, and the Christian forces, led by King John III Sobieski, of Poland, defeated the Turks. After several more campaigns, by the end of the century, all of Hungary had been returned to Austrian control.

The Battle of Vienna - 1683


With the end of the Turkish threat, Baroque Era Austria thrived with scientific, intellectual, architectural and cultural advancements.

First 12-hour clock with two hands - 1700


Baroque Era Vienna


Hofburg Palace in Vienna


Empress Maria Theresa with family in 1755. The two-month-old baby in the gold cradle is her youngest daughter, Maria Antonia, known to history as Marie Antoinette.


Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna, the imperial summer palace Maria Theresa had renovated in the rococo style of Baroque architecture


Sword of an Austrian Grenadier - 1765


Statue of Empress Maria Theresa between the art and natural history museums in Vienna


High Fashion in 1780


Imperial Crypt containing the bodies of Maria Theresa and her husband - designed by her.


Here is the rest of the Imperial Habsburg Crypt. It lies below Capuchin's Church in the Neue Markt Square near the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. Buried in the crypt are 142 bodies, including 12 emperors and 18 empresses.


As the Baroque Era ended, Austria's greatest triumph still lay ahead. But first would come the double disasters of the French Revolution and Napoleon.

Chapter 60 - Grapes into Wine ... the Winery

Domaine Pottelsdorf is a wine cooperative used by farmers all over this part of Burgenland. The cooperative makes the wine and sells it under their label. Many quality wines are available at the cooperative, and visitors can also take a tour of the vineyard. Pottelsdorf was first mentioned as a wine village in 1271.

Please forgive any errors in the description of the process. Those who know me well understand that I'm not at my best explaining anything technical or scientific.

After we picked the grapes Matthias drove to the cooperative. Here, he has positioned the trailer onto a rotating platform.


The grapes will be dumped into this receiver pit onto a horizontal lead screw.


The grapes are emptied into the pit which has a 12,000 kg limit. Matthias brought 582 kg of grapes on this day.


The screw begins its work.


The rotors turn the grapes ...


mashes them ...


measures by weight which determines sugar content ...


The computer tells which quality the grapes are. The higher the sugar content, the higher the quality.


This chart shows the quality designation for sugar content. The price increases from top to bottom as quality increases. The price for middle to medium high quality is usually from about 60 cents (Euro) to 80 cents (Euro) per kilogram.


The next stop for the grapes is the masher where they will sit for three to four days. A big tumbler turns them and gets rid of the stalks. These are the stalks from Ljuba's family's grapes.


A lot of stalks accumulate throughout the day.


The trailer will be washed once here, twice at home and then disinfected.


The cooperative contains the winery, wine shop and museum.




This sculpture is on the stairs leading to the museum area.


The fermenting process begins in these huge tanks. This is a dangerous period as gas builds up which can be fatal. Only professionals deal with the grapes now.






The liquid is drained and filtered, and the juice is poured into wooden barrels
like these although some use steel casks nowadays. The barrels are made of oak and are commonly used three or four times in a 12 to 14 month period.


It is already wine, but it can be left indefinitely in the barrels. Although the wine shouldn't be poured into bottles for a few months, the wine can wait a year or 20 years in the barrels. Red wine stays longer in the barrels than white wine. White wine grapes have a shorter process. In the masher the grapes are immediately pressed and then removed; if the process is done right away with red grapes, the vintner will get a white red wine.


Some of the highest quality wine are displayed.


The wine shop where the winery's products are available.


I thought the prices were quite reasonable. Eliminating the middleman certainly saves the consumer money.


Ljuba said the grapes we picked that day will go into a cuvee, or blended wine, like this one.


Some of the winery's products have won awards.

Chapter 59 - Klingenbach History, Pt. 4 ... the Croatian Experience

So we're in central Europe in the year 1500.



Klingenbach is still in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Aristocrats and royals are wearing lovely flowing clothes.


They wear beautiful jewelry.


They decorate their castles with golden works of art like this Cellini sculpture.


They can even tell time with this early clock that has one hand to indicate a 24-hour cycle.


They live in places like Rakoczi Castle in Sarospatak, Hungary, built about this time.


Yes, I realize that I show people, places and things primarily relating to the nobility. I know there were a lot more peasants, but they didn't wear pretty clothes or jewelry, have art or live in castles. Whatever they had is lost to history so I choose to show the only artifacts that have survived, even though they did pertain to the upper classes.

So in 1500 everything was hunky dory - relatively speaking of course. Everyone back then shared vulnerability to invaders and epidemics; most of them in all classes died young. And everything was about to get a whole lot worse.

The Kingdom of Hungary had ruled for over 500 years. During its golden age in the reign of Matthias Corvinus, he actually occupied Vienna for five years. But beginning in the early 1500s, the Hungarians faced their worst enemy, the Ottoman Turks. It was a disaster for Hungary and basically an end of their empire.

A depiction of an attack on a castle.


At the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, the Hungarian army was defeated by the Turks.


Under the press of war, the central authority in the Kingdom of Hungary collapsed, and the kingdom was split into three parts which remained separate for about 200 years. The Klingenbach area was part of Royal Hungary controlled by the Habsburgs. The population in this area was severely reduced by the repeated incursions by the Turks.

Meanwhile, about 150 miles southeast of here, things were going from bad to worse in Croatia. Almost continual war against the Turks had decimated the population. [All told, in three centuries of Ottoman occupation, 3,000 settlements and over 550 Catholic churches and monasteries were destroyed. Under severe pressure some Croats converted to Islam, mainly in Bosnia, but the population in northwest Croatia resisted, which has led to the ethnic differences that persist today and was a big factor in the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.]

Three contemporaneous depictions of Croat suffering and war against the Ottoman Turks






The Austrian king, realizing that the Burgenland area in Austria had lost population and the people of Croatia were suffering greatly from the Turks, offered land and houses in Burgenland to Croatians. They jumped at the opportunity and over a period from 1533 to 1584, it's estimated that about 300,000 emigrated from Croatia to Austria.

The emigration of Croats into Austria.

The Croats fled from riverland areas of Gacka, Lika and Krbava, Moslavina in Slavonia and an area of present-day northern Bosnia near Tuzla.

The Croats left behind continued to fight the Turks. In the Battle of Szigetvar in 1566, 2,300 Croatian and Hungarian soldiers held back a 100,000-man Ottoman army for two months. They fought to the last man in a battle that Cardinal Richelieu of France called "the battle that saved civilization." It is believed that the battle delayed the Ottoman push against Vienna that year - and by extension, Klingenbach. Of course the Turks weren't done - they invaded several more times in the 16th and 17th centuries.

In 1593 at the Battle of Sisak, a vastly outnumbered force of Croat and Hungarian soldiers defeated an Ottoman Turk army. Another battle that prevented an Ottoman invasion that would have decimated Burgenland.

Sisak Fortress


A Hussar of the day


The Klingenbach area began the 16th century peacefully before being ravaged and depopulated by the Ottoman Turks. At the end of the century a whole new population resettled the area, and they have a strong presence in Burgenland today.