The Holy Lance of Vienna is a winged iron spearhead of early-medieval type, mounted with bands of gold and silver and pierced to hold a thin iron pin venerated as a nail from the Cross of Christ. From the tenth century it served as a sacred emblem of imperial authority in the Holy Roman Empire, believed to guarantee victory to the ruler who bore it, and only later was it identified with the lance of the Passion. Popular writers, drawing on twentieth-century occult legends and its brief seizure by the Nazi state, gave it the dramatic name "Spear of Destiny." It is one of several relics across Europe that claim to be the lance of Longinus, and it is the most famous. The object is on permanent display in the Imperial Treasury of the Hofburg in Vienna as part of the regalia of the Holy Roman Empire.
A non-invasive archaeometallurgical study conducted by Vienna's VIAS research project, using micro-XRF and metallographic analysis without damaging the object, found the lance's blade core to be low-carbon iron forged in the late eighth century, consistent with a Carolingian "winged lance" typology of that period, with the weld seams joining an embedded iron pin, the "Nail" tradition identifies with a relic of the Crucifixion, showing evidence of an eleventh-century repair. The Kunsthistorisches Museum's own current object label already dates the blade to the Carolingian period, roughly 750 to 800 CE, a scholarly position the newer material analysis reinforces rather than overturns, and one that sits well after the first-century date the relic's traditional identification as a genuine Crucifixion-era spear would require.