← Back to Thaer

Vienna — the Neutral City

Where all four theological empires' spheres of control converge — claimed by none of them. The map (updated 2026-08-22) is no longer an invented star shape — it's the real 1706 Linienwall survey, the real Danube and Donaukanal, and the real old city (via four geocoded Ringstrasse points), all ported in from the sidebar panel at right, on one shared coordinate system centered on Stephansdom. The wall is genuinely just an open arc, not a closed ring — its two real ends terminate at the canal rather than meeting each other. The four legations and Wardenhall are still invented flavor, not sourced from any GPT log, but as of 2026-08-23 their positions are no longer stale leftovers from the old star shape — each now sits at the real wall point (or, for the Caliphate, the real island) that actually minimizes distance to its patron's nearest territory, since this setting's teleportation magic has range limits; the Hofburg Palace marker is the exception — Franz Joseph, the Demiduke of Vienna, is real sourced material with his own dedicated page. Click a landmark for details.

N VIENNA civitas neutralis Donau Donaukanal Stephansdom Matzleinsdorfer Linie Leopoldstadt (island — no wall traced here)

Legend

Selected

Click a landmark.

The Linienwall — real scale

Donau Donaukanal old city Stephansdom Matzleinsdorfer Linie Leopoldstadt (island — no wall traced here) Linienwall, 1704
The Linienwall line above is no longer an approximation of any kind — it's the actual 1706 survey, digitized by researcher Maximilian Kaiser (m-kaiser/Vienna-1700 on GitHub) from the real Marinoniplan, a historical map literally titled "...mit dem Linienwall," held by the Wien Museum. All 22 of its valid digitized segments (two tiny fragments far to the north sit outside the wall's real bounding box and were excluded) chain into one real, continuous, genuinely jagged arc spanning the full historical extent; reprojected here from real lat/long into the same coordinate system as everything else on this page. An earlier version of this panel only used 15 of those 22 segments and looked visibly incomplete as a result — that was an error in the reconstruction, not a gap in the survey; this is the corrected full chain. It's drawn open, not closed, because the real data doesn't close either — the wall's two ends both terminate near the Danube Canal (one close to the old city, the other out near Sankt Marx), which finished the enclosure on that side rather than more rampart. The old city star (still a smoothed approximation through four Ringstrasse points, not this same treatment yet) sits inside it. Built in just four months in 1704, one year before the Yawning, on the order of Emperor Leopold I (Josef's own father). Traffic passed through nine real toll gates (each charging the Liniengeld) — Matzleinsdorfer Linie is the one with the best-documented archival record. This is the real boundary Sühnestadt's exile line is drawn against. Note the dashed circle near the top: that's Leopoldstadt, the island between the Danube Canal and the main Danube. It was administratively part of the same Linien toll system, but no wall geometry for it turned up in this source's fortification layers even though the source map covers that ground — most likely because, as an island, its boundary was the rivers themselves plus toll checkpoints at the bridges rather than a built rampart. Marked here as an honest gap, not drawn as a guess.