Holy Lance of Vienna

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.

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.

Christian tradition since the High Middle Ages has honoured the Vienna lance as the weapon of the Roman soldier, named Longinus in later legend, who pierced the side of the crucified Jesus. Modern examination does not support that identification. The custodian museum classifies the object as a Carolingian winged lance of the eighth century, and in 2003 the metallurgist Robert Feather, permitted to study it closely, concluded that the spearhead dates to about the seventh century, many centuries after the Crucifixion.

The one component consistent with the first century is the small iron pin fixed into the blade as a supposed nail of the Cross, which does not authenticate the lance itself. Because the principal object post-dates the events of the Passion by roughly seven hundred years, scholarship rejects the claim that it is the lance of Golgotha, and it is classed here as debunked while its genuine importance as imperial regalia is preserved.