Schärding (Upper Austrian: Scháréng) is a town in Upper Austria with 5269 inhabitants (as of January 1, 2020). Schärding is known as a baroque town on the Inn, with its numerous baroque town houses and historical squares. It is the district capital of the Schärding district and at the same time the local center for the surrounding district.
The city is located on the Inn River, 15 km south
of Passau, on the western edge of the Innviertel. Two different
natural spaces meet in Schärding. The hilly Sauwald, part of the
Bohemian Massif in the north and the expiring plain of the Inn
Valley to the south. The city is 313 m above sea level in the
Innviertel. The extension is 4.1 km from north to south and 1.9 km
from west to east. The total area is 4.08 km². 2.4% of the area is
forested, 31.7% is used for agriculture.
The Inn forms the
border to the neighboring Free State of Bavaria. Directly opposite
on the Bavarian side of the Inn is the community of Neuhaus am Inn,
which can be reached via two bridges.
The area around
Schärding was settled since the Neolithic Age. The first settlements
are documented by archaeological finds (hole axes or flat hatchets)
along the courses of the Antiesen, Inn and Pram rivers in the
Neolithic Age. Before in 15 BC When the Romans advanced as far as
the Danube and the Innbaiern and Schärding became part of the Roman
province of Noricum, Celts settled the area. In 488 AD, King Odoacer
had his troops withdraw to the south.
West Germanic Bavarians
migrated up the Danube about 30 years later and occupied the area
between the Vienna Woods and Lech. The place names ending in -ing,
-ham and -heim clearly indicate the conquest. The name of the
district town 'Scardinga' comes from the name for the settlement of
a Scardo with his clan.
Schärding was first mentioned in a
document in 804 as the Passauer Gutshof scardinga. The
geographically favorable location of the castle rock in the
immediate vicinity of the Inn was used early on to build a
fortification.
Since the 10th century, the place developed
through the lucrative trade on the Inn as a market center and seat
of the county of Schärding under the Bavarian families
Formbach-Neuburg. From 1160 it belonged to the Andechs-Meranien and
from 1248 to 1504 the Wittelsbacher.
At the time of the early
church organization in the Middle Ages, Schärding belonged to the
original parish of St. Weihflorian. Like the Münzkirchen parish,
this consisted of areas that had belonged to the St. Severin parish
in Passau's Innstadt. St. Weihflorian was first designated as an
independent parish in 1182 when it was incorporated into the Passau
“Innbruckamt”, which was subordinate to the St. Aegidien Hospital in
the city center. The parish of St. Weihflorian was very extensive:
it lay between the area of activity of the original parish of St.
Severin and that of the original parish of Münsteuer and included
the area of today's parishes of Brunnenthal, Schärding, St.
Florian am Inn, Suben, St. Marienkirchen and Eggerding , plus shares
in today's parishes of Taufkirchen, Lambrechte and Rainbach. When
the parish of St. Weihflorian was relocated to Schärding in 1380,
the town itself became a parish.
Due to the favorable
location on the Inn, Schärding developed into a large trading
center, especially for salt, wood, ores, wine, silk, glass, grain,
cloth goods and cattle. At the end of the 13th century, the place
was given market rights. After frequent changes of ownership in the
14th century, Schärding was elevated to the status of town for the
first time on January 20, 1316 (by the Wittelsbachers) and later on
September 24, 1364 (by Rudolf IV of Habsburg). In 1369 the Peace of
Schärding ended the dispute between Bavaria and Austria over Tyrol,
and Schärding, which was pledged to Habsburg, came back to Bavaria.
From 1429 to 1436 the city's fortifications were expanded by Duke Ludwig the Bearded. Among other things, the outer castle gate, the city moat, the Linzer and Passauer gate and the water gate were built in the course of these construction measures. In 1527 the Lutheran reform theologian Leonhard Kaiser was executed here. During the Thirty Years' War, especially in 1628, 1634, 1645, 1647 and 1651, plague epidemics raged in the city. As a result of the War of the Bavarian Succession, in the Peace Treaty of Teschen in 1779, the Innviertel (Innbaiern), which had been Bavarian until then, and thus Schärding as well, was awarded to the Habsburgs. After the Napoleonic Wars in which the city burned down on April 26, 1809 and the Innviertel returned to Bavaria with the Peace of Paris in 1810, the city came back into the Habsburg sphere of influence after the Congress of Vienna in 1816 and was suddenly on the edge of the State; the old trade connections were cut off by a customs border. Already after the first annexation to the Habsburg countries in 1779, the salt trade had come to a standstill, as Austria obtained the salt from the Salzkammergut and, moreover, the salt trade was a state monopoly. In addition, with the establishment of the railways, the Inn lost its importance as a traffic route. The associated economic stagnation is the reason why Schärding today has an almost completely preserved historical townscape in the typical Inn-Salzach architecture.