Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 5: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland, Part 1
History
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 5: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland, Part 1
Austria -- Description and travel; Germany -- Description and travel; Switzerland -- Description and travel
One of the most interesting objects in Vienna is the imperial armory. We
were admitted through tickets previously procured from the armory
direction; as there was already one large company within, we were told
to wait in the court till our turn came. Around the wall, on the inside,
is suspended the enormous chain which the Turks stretched across the
Danube at Buda in the year 1529 to obstruct the navigation. It has eight
thousand links and is nearly a mile in length. The court is filled with
cannon of all shapes and sizes, many of which were conquered from other
nations. I saw a great many which were cast during the French
Revolution, with the words "Liberté! Egalité!" upon them, and a number
of others bearing the simple letter "N."....
The first wing contains banners used in the French Revolution, and
liberty-trees with the red cap, the armor of Rudolph of Hapsburg,
Maximilian, I., the emperor Charles V., and the hat, sword and order of
Marshal Schwarzenberg. Some of the halls represent a fortification, with
walls, ditches and embankments, made of muskets and swords. A long room
in the second wing contains an encampment in which twelve or fifteen
large tents are formed in like manner. There was also exhibited the
armor of a dwarf king of Bohemia and Hungary who died a gray-headed old
man in his twentieth year, the sword of Marlborough, the coat of
Gustavus Adolphus, pierced in the breast and back with the bullet which
killed him at Lützen, the armor of the old Bohemian princess Libussa,
and that of the amazon Wlaska, with a steel vizor made to fit the
features of her face.
The last wing was the most remarkable. Here we saw the helm and
breastplate of Attila, king of the Huns, which once glanced at the head
of his myriads of wild hordes before the walls of Rome; the armor of
Count Stahremberg, who commanded Vienna during the Turkish siege in
1529, and the holy banner of Mohammed, taken at that time from the
grand vizier, together with the steel harness of John Sobieski of
Poland, who rescued Vienna from the Turkish troops under Kara Mustapha;
the hat, sword and breastplate of Godfrey of Bouillon, the crusader-king
of Jerusalem, with the banners of the cross the crusaders had borne to
Palestine and the standard they captured from the Turks on the walls of
the Holy City. I felt all my boyish enthusiasm for the romantic age of
the crusaders revive as I looked on the torn and moldering banners which
once waved on the hills of Judea, or perhaps followed the sword of the
Lion-Heart through the fight on the field of Ascalon. What tales could
they not tell, those old standards cut and shivered by spear and lance!
What brave hands have carried them through the storm of battle, what
dying eyes have looked upward to the cross on the folds as the last
prayer was breathed for the rescue of the holy sepulcher.
[Footnote A: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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