The lance is documented from the Ottonian era, when it counted among the most sacred of the imperial insignia; chroniclers connect it with Saint Maurice and with Otto I's victory over the Magyars at the Lechfeld in 955. During the thirteenth century its meaning shifted, and it came to be venerated as the very lance that opened Christ's side, the iron pin within it read as a Holy Nail. For centuries it was preserved with the other imperial treasures at Nuremberg. It was carried to Vienna in 1800 to keep it from Napoleon, brought back to Nuremberg by the National Socialist regime in 1938 as a symbol of German imperial continuity, hidden during the war, and recovered by United States forces in 1945, who returned it to Austria. It has remained in the Vienna Schatzkammer since, catalogued among the regalia of the Empire.
The Vienna lance is not the only object claiming the title Holy Lance: at least two other major rival claimants exist. A lance kept at St Peter's Basilica in Rome was given to Pope Innocent VIII in 1492 by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, and a further lance is venerated at Etchmiadzin, the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church, each with its own independent tradition of authenticity unconnected to the other two. As with the multiple rival True Cross fragments and Holy Grail claimants recorded elsewhere in this atlas, the existence of several independent objects all claiming the same singular relic status is itself evidence against any one of them being straightforwardly what tradition claims, since the underlying event, if historical, could have left only one genuine spear.