The rescue of the Lipizzans during World War II by American troops was made famous by the Disney movie Miracle of the White Stallions.

The Lipizzaner is closely associated with the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, Austria, where the horses demonstrate the haute école or "high school" movements of classical dressage, including the highly controlled, stylized jumps and other movements known as the "airs above the ground".

These horses are mostly bred at the Piber Federal Stud, near Graz, Austria, and are trained using traditional methods of classical dressage that date back hundreds of years.

Eight stallions are recognized as the classic foundation bloodstock of the breed, all foaled in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Lipizzan horse breeding traditions are recognized by UNESCO and inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

[2] However, horses bred to be closer to the original carriage-horse type are taller, approaching 16.1 hands (65 inches, 165 cm).

[5] Until the eighteenth century, Lipizzans had other coat colors, including dun, bay, chestnut, black, piebald, and skewbald.

[8] The earliest predecessors of the Lipizzan originated in the seventh century when Barb horses were brought into Spain by the Moors and crossed on native Spanish stock.

[9][10] By the sixteenth century, when the Habsburgs ruled both Spain and Austria, a powerful but agile horse was desired both for military uses and for use in the fashionable and rapidly growing riding schools for the nobility of central Europe.

Therefore, in 1562, the Habsburg Emperor Maximillian II brought the Spanish Andalusian horse to Austria and founded the court stud at Kladrub.

In 1580, his brother, Archduke Charles II, ruler of Inner Austria, established a similar stud at Lipizza (now Lipica), located in modern-day Slovenia, from which the breed obtained its name.

[2][9] When the stud farm was established, Lipizza was located within the municipal limits of Trieste, an autonomous city under Habsburg sovereignty.

[2] The six "classical dynasties"[14] are: Two additional stallion lines are found in Croatia, Hungary, and other eastern European countries, as well as in North America.

Thus, the animals were divided between several different studs in the new postwar nations of Austria, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

[24] During World War II, the high command of Nazi Germany transferred most of Europe's Lipizzan breeding stock to Hostau, Czechoslovakia.

[25] The rescue of the Lipizzans by the United States Army, made famous by the Disney movie Miracle of the White Stallions, occurred in two parts: The Third United States Army, under the command of General George S. Patton, was near St. Martins in the spring of 1945 and learned that the Lipizzan stallions were in the area.

[29] On May 12, American soldiers began riding, trucking, and herding the horses 35 miles across the border into Kotztinz, Germany.

[31] During the Croatian War of Independence, from 1991 to 1995, the horses at the Lipik stable in Croatia were taken by the Serbs to Novi Sad, Serbia.

[33] The Lipizzan breed suffered a setback to its population when a viral epidemic hit the Piber Stud in 1983.

Sâmbăta de Jos, in Romania, has the greatest number of horses, with 400, followed by Piber in Austria (360), Lipica in Slovenia (358), Szilvásvárad in Hungary (262), Monterotondo in Italy (230), Đakovo-Lipik in Croatia (220), and Topoľčianky in Slovakia (200).

[41] In October 2008, during a visit to Slovenia, a Lipizzan at Lipica, named 085 Favory Canissa XXII, was given to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

[43] Inscriptions include state parties Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

[44][45][38] The traditional horse training methods for Lipizzans were developed at the Spanish Riding School and are based on the principles of classical dressage, which in turn traces to the Ancient Greek writer Xenophon, whose works were rediscovered in the sixteenth century.

Other writers who strongly influenced the training methods of the Spanish Riding School include Federico Grisone, the founder of the first riding academy in Naples, who lived during the sixteenth century, and Antoine de Pluvinel and François Robichon de la Guérinière, two Frenchmen from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the mid-twentieth century, Alois Podhajsky wrote a number of works that serve as textbooks for many dressage riders today.

[19] Worldwide, the Lipizzan today competes in dressage and driving, as well as retaining their classic position at the Spanish Riding School.

The movie was the only live-action, relatively realistic film set against a World War II backdrop that Disney has ever produced.