Braunau

Braunau (Czech Broumov), a town of Bohemia, Austria, 139 m. E.N.E. of Prague by rail. Pop. (1900) 7622, chiefly German. The town is built on a rocky eminence on the right bank of the Steine. It has an imposing Benedictine abbey, once a castle, but converted into a religious house in 1322, when Ottakar I. gave the district to the Benedictines. Noteworthy also is the great church of Saints Wenceslaus and Adalbert, built between 1683 and 1733. This stands on the site where, in 1618, the Protestants attempted to build a church, the forcible prevention of which by Abbot Wolfgang Solander was the immediate cause of the protest of the Bohemian estates and the “defenestration” of the ministers Martinic and Slavata, which opened the Thirty Years’ War. After the battle of the White Hill, near Prague (1620), the town was deprived of all its privileges, which were, however, in great part restored nine years later. It is now a manufacturing centre (cloth, woollen and cotton stuffs, &c.) and has a considerable trade.

* * *