streets there are, on each side, booths and shops of every description.  All the allotments of ground upon which the habitations throughout the city were constructed are square and exactly on a line with each other; each allotment being sufficiently spacious for handsome buildings, with corresponding courts and gardens.  One of these was assigned to each head of a family; that is to say, such a person of such a tribe had one square allotted to him, and so of the rest.  Afterward the property passed from hand to hand.  In this manner the whole interior of the city is disposed in squares, so as to resemble a chess-board, and planned out with a degree of precision and beauty impossible to describe.

The wall of the city has twelve gates, three on each side of the square, and over each gate and compartment of the wall there is a handsome building; so that on each side of the square there are five such buildings, containing large rooms, in which are disposed the arms of those who form the garrison of the city, every gate being guarded by a thousand men.  It is not to be understood that such a force is stationed there in consequence of the apprehension of danger from any hostile power whatever, but as a guard suitable to the honor and dignity of the sovereign.

FOUNDING OF THE HOUSE OF HAPSBURG

A.D. 1273

WILLIAM COXE

The house of Hapsburg—–­also called the house of Austria—­owes its origin and firm establishment to the most celebrated of the Hapsburgs, a German princely family who derived their name from Hapsburg castle, built about 1020, on the banks of the Aare in Switzerland.  This founder of the imperial line was Rudolph, son of Albert IV, Count of Hapsburg and Landgrave of Alsace.  Rudolph was born in 1218, and died at Germersheim, Germany, in 1291.  He succeeded his father in Hapsburg and Alsace in 1239, and in 1273 was elected German King (Rudolph I), with the substance, though not the title, of the imperial dignity of the Holy Roman Empire.

It is said that the electors desired an emperor, but not the exercise of imperial power, and that in Rudolph they saw a candidate of comparative lowliness, from whom their authority stood in little jeopardy.  At the age of fifty-five the new sovereign assumed his throne in the face of difficulty and danger.  He was opposed by the Spanish claimant, Alfonso of Castile, and confronted a formidable rival in Ottocar, King of Bohemia, whose contumacy disturbed the reign of Rudolph from its very beginning.

Rudolph’s enemies had appealed against him to Pope Gregory X, and Rudolph in turn sought the ratification of the Pontiff, to whom, immediately after his election, he sent messengers with a letter imploring papal countenance.  From this moment to the day when he finally overcame Ottocar in the field and secured the possessions