The other great early Habsburg cultic site is the small town of Klosterneuburg (New Castle Monastery), just north of Vienna. For centuries an unvarying part of the calendar was the annual pilgrimage by the senior family member to the ancient Augustinian abbey founded by the Babenberg margrave of the region, Leopold III, to attend services to pray for the souls of their Babenberg predecessors. It is this complex of buildings which gives the Habsburgs their legitimacy, conferring on an extinct prior dynasty, an ugly civil war and an Imperial land-grab all the majesty of religious endorsement.
