An engraved view of the fortress, the frontispiece to Franz Schams's topographical description of Peterwardein and its surroundings, published by Hartleben at Pest in 1820. The plate is taken from across the Danube. A long crenellated curtain wall with a bastion runs along the near bank, trees and roofs showing behind it, and a pontoon bridge on boats crosses the water and lands at a gate in that wall. Behind and above, the Upper Fortress stands on its height with a long barracks range along the skyline, a clock tower and a church spire below it, and the glacis falling away to the right. Most of the sheet is given to a worked sky of banked cloud drawn in fine horizontal lines. The caption below the impression reads Peterwardein, with the engraver's signature at the lower right of the plate.
Engraved by J. B. Pfeitz[...]
About this place
A Habsburg star fortress on the right bank of the Danube, built between 1692 and 1780 on a site fortified since antiquity: the Romans held Cusum here, a medieval fortress followed, and Cistercian monks kept a monastery on the hill in the 13th century. Beneath its walls Prince Eugene of Savoy defeated a far larger Ottoman army on 5 August 1716. Nicknamed the Gibraltar on the Danube, the fortress conceals some 16 kilometres of underground counter-mine galleries dug in 1764-1776. On its clock tower the hands are reversed, the long hand showing the hours so that fishermen on the Danube could read the time from a distance. The fortress still stands over the river and houses the City Museum of Novi Sad.
On the card
Peterwardein. J. B. Pfeitz[...] sc.
Peterwardein, the German name of the fortress. The signature at the lower right is that of the engraver, marked sc. for sculpsit; the surname does not fully resolve at this resolution.
- Date
- 1820
- Coordinates
- 45.25250, 19.86250
- Source
- Austrian National Library
- Credit
- Austrian National Library
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 1760 × 1200 px
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