The History Of The Spear Of Destiny

...as a convinced believer that Christ was the Son of God and would later be canonized into sainthood. Once the blood of Christ flowed upon the spear, it is said that it was ordained with mystical power. After this event took place, the spear was returned to a nearby armory. Then, in 66 AD, the armory was seized during the Jewish revolts and the spear disappeared. Early Christian traditions said that it was delivered into safe hands, hidden away and protected during the Jewish revolts, and the subsequent Roman purges thereafter. Eighty years later, in 135 AD, Emperor Hadrian sought to destroy the last relics of Christ and ordered the total destruction of Jerusalem. All Jews were expelled from the city, but those who were followers of Christ were tolerated as a minority in the Greco-Roman city. So what happened to the spear? What is known is that the Catholic Church kept the remains of saints, but Christ left no personal relics, so the lance that had pierced his side became a treasured, close-guarded secret. With the passing of time, the legend of the Holy Lance grew and grew. Soon this inanimate object became a mystical symbol of power and faith. People believed it had power, so therefore, it did. Soon this idea overtook even the most powerful of rulers, thus the Holy Lance became an object of unbelievable obsession. The spear that had pierced the side of Christ was kept hidden for over 300 years after his death. Then, during the greatest archaeological expedition of the ancient world, the excavation of Jerusalem, it was found. The excavation, strangely enough, enough was ordered by Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine. After she had a dream, where she was led to the holy sites of Jesus of Nazareth, there was a temple of Venus within the city. Helena ordered that the temple be demolished, and underneath the foundation, they found a tomb. A tomb which they believed to be the tomb of Christ. Helena's excavations also later revealed the place of Christ's crucifixion. And even stranger and more dramatic, they also found Jesus' crown of thorns, some of the nails used during his his crucifixion. And the wooden cross which he died upon. At first several wooden crosses were found, and it's said that in order to determine which cross was indeed the one used in Christ's crucifixion, Helena had the corpse of a man brought in. The corpse was placed on the first two to no effect, but the third cross, had the corpse laid upon it, caused the corpse to sit back up, subsequently reviving This spectacle was apparently witnessed by multiple people and carefully documented by those witnesses and historians of the time and was taken as a true sign of divinity that that cross was indeed the one. The magical power of these holy relics to the people of the time were believed without question. This belief was also held by the Emperor Constantine himself. In the year 312 AD, prior to the Great Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine looked toward the midday sun, where he said he saw a cross of light. Under this cross were the words, by this conquer. Because of this, Constantine adopted the cross as a symbol of his rule, embraced Christianity, and became the ruler of the entire Roman Empire. As a result of this conversion, Constantine ordered a massive church building program as a sign of his devotion and encouraged frequent pilgrimage to the holy sites. Because of this, we have our first written historical account of the whereabouts of the lance after its rediscovery from one of those pilgrims. He said he went into the basilica in the middle of Jerusalem and there he saw the holy lance erected in such a way that it formed a cross. Constantine did not personally possess the lance, but he did possess the nails used during the crucifixion. He had them turned into symbols of his empire. One of the nails was fitted into a crown which he wore, and the other was made into a lance. He used this newly crafted lance to trace out the boundaries of his new city, Constantinople. which would later become the capital of the Roman Empire, and which would also survive for a thousand years, even after the fall of the Western Empire. The lance and the crown were sacred relics, denoting power. Constantine brought them to Constantinople, which proved to be a wise decision. When the Western Empire fell to the barbarian tribes, various leaders of those tribes, including Attila the Hun, demanded the lance as part of their treaty with Rome. Even pagan warriors believed in the mystical power of the lance. But the keepers of these relics, the leaders and popes of the 5th century, did not hand them over. Both remained under the watchful eye of the Byzantine emperors until the Persians sacked Jerusalem in 614 AD. During this invasion by the Persians, the tip of the blade of the original spear was broken off and the person who managed to break it off escaped to Constantinople. When the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius recaptured Jerusalem in 670, he restored the relics to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Although the lance blade was now broken, its perceived mystical power did not diminish, it increased. There were now two sites that could claim ownership of the lance, in which Christ's blood flowed. The shaft in the neck of the original lance remained in Jerusalem, And the broken tip in Constantinople. After this time, the spear was held by multiple leaders and dynasties. 25 years before he were to become king, the pope gifted him a lance, who he said had been carried by Constantine in battle. Charlemagne the Great, the King of France, ruled from 768 until his death One of the enduring details of his rule was that he possessed the Holy Lance. He was the first in a long line of leaders to use the power of the lance to hold his holy empire together. He was said to have carried the spear into 47 victorious battles, but died shortly after dropping the spear. After Charlemagne's death, the holy lance became the trophy of kings throughout all of Europe. In the early 900s, it appeared in the ownership of the Saxon King of England, He sold it to an Italian count who gave it as a gift to King Rudolph of Burgundy. Rudolf, knowing its importance to the Holy Roman Empire, ransomed it. He made a deal with Henry I of Germany, trading the lance for an entire province in Switzerland. The lance in the early Germanic world was a sign and symbol of rulership, a weapon that was passed through a religious ceremony from ruler to ruler. Henry I is considered the founder of Germany. He would have also become the first of many kings and emperors to covet the lance. He believed himself to be the rightful heir to the Holy Roman Empire of Constantine. But the current pope did not. This consequently began a struggle of power between the spiritual and secular rulers that would last for centuries. Henry sought to prove his rule by collecting holy relics, and he built a special chapel to house them. Upon his death, the lance was passed to his son, Otto. Otto, at the Battle of Bergen, prayed with the lance in hand until his army was victorious. His success in war against the Hungarians and the Poles put him first in line for the title of Holy Roman Emperor. In 955, he won a shattering victory over the Hungarian invaders. He crushed their power, and due to this, people of the time believed he was more than a king and should be honored with some kind of imperial office. Otto believed that he had won the battle due to his possession of the Holy Lance. Interestingly enough, Otto had copies of the lance made, which he then gave to the kings of Hungary and Poland after touching them to the original lance. The lands in which he had conquered, at this time, had become his allies. Otto was well aware that the original spear of Longinus was in the east, but the Constantine spear which he possessed had taken on a life of its own. Otto's grandson, Otto III, later enhanced the spear by adding another nail from the cross of Christ to the artifact. Afterwards, again it was carried into battle, and again Holy Roman Emperors were victorious, thus making the Holy Roman Lance a divine symbol of Germanic power. In 1250, during the reign of Frederick II, the lance was moved to Nuremberg, where it stayed for the next 550 years. In 1350, Charles IV took it upon himself to engrave what him and his men already believed, that this was the true lance and nail of Christ. But what about the appearance of other lances? It seemed that whenever there was a great battle to decide the fate of an empire of Europe, there was always an appearance of a holy lance on the winning side. Some believed this to be motivation for the great crusades. In 1095, the Emperor of Constantinople wrote a letter to the Pope asking for aid in the form of military assistance in his war with the Turks. At a Congress of Kings, the Pope used this letter to attack the nobility present, using their sin as a tool of motivation to have them mobilize forces and go save Jerusalem. Thus, the armies began to descend upon Jerusalem, beginning the Great Crusades. Ahead of these knights lay many hardships, spells of disease, and famine, but they pressed on anyways. Upon reaching Jerusalem, the Crusaders saw a large buildup of Muslim forces, hoping to discourage the armies sent to liberate the holy city. Then in May 1098, the Crusaders caught a break. A traitor secretly led the Crusaders into the city in the middle of the night, and by The city was theirs. But it seemed that they had only traded one hardship for another, because shortly after, another large Muslim army descended upon the city. They were tired, angry, and outnumbered. The situation looked dire. Then a soldier stepped forward and said he had had a vision from Saint Andrew. He said he knew where to find the Holy Lance of Christ. In front of skeptics, the soldier began to dig in the basement of St. Anthony's Cathedral and found an ancient lance. Upon possessing it, the starved, exhausted crusader forces attacked their outnumbering foe, and miraculously, they won. The victory was attributed to the lance, which the crusaders believed to be the actual spear of Christ. The spear was then sent to Constantinople, where by now the supposed original spear was already It's already being kept. The appearance of now a total of three lances caused great confusion at the time. All three were now housed in Constantinople, but the Armenians also said to be in possession of a holy lance as well, and they also believed that their spear In 1204 AD, Crusaders stormed the city linking east to west, and the lances became the trophies was the true relic of Baldwin II. In 1241, he sold the relics, of the crucifixion. including the tip of the original spear, to King Louis of France, who then built a special room to house them in Paris along with his other collectibles. It was here that the relics stayed until the French Revolution, and after the French French Revolution, the tip remained in France, but the other spears disappeared. Or so it seemed. As time progressed, the beliefs in relics and mysticism gave way to knowledge and reason, starting during the Renaissance. As the honeymoon of the Renaissance began to fade, the bleak realization of reality and industrialism set in. Once again, people began to believe in great quests and mystical powerful artifacts. These dreams would enter into the 20th century. The Holy Roman Empire had begun with the reign of King Charlemagne in 800 AD and ended 1000 years later when Napoleon conquered Austria in the year 1800. It's said that Napoleon attempted to seize the lance during his taking of Austria, but it was smuggled out of Vienna before he could obtain it, and it ended up in the possession of the Habsburg family. along with the remnants of the empire. The Habsburg family had ruled the empire since the 13th century. For over a hundred years, they had presided over the ancient house which possessed the battle trophies of Christianity. They were the symbols of power for the old Roman empire. It's believed that Kaiser Wilhelm II was briefly in possession of the spear before it found its way to the Habsburg treasury house in Vienna. The dreams, as mentioned before, of mystical knights, quests, holy grails, and ancient artifacts were brought to life by a Germanic composer named Richard Wagner in the 19th century. From these stories, Wagner composed an opera named Parsifal, a story about Teutonic knights in search of the holy grail. The key to their success was the ownership of the Holy Lance. Wagner's Germanic-inspired mythology within his operas carried into the 20th century, and in 1912, during a performance of Parsifal in Vienna, an unemployed artist was transfixed, absorbed in the magic of past Germanic greatness. His name was Adolf Hitler. Hitler was very familiar with the lance and in the possession of the Hofburg Collection in Vienna. After all, it had been owned by all his heroes, such as Frederick Barbarossa and Otto the Great, the emperors of the First Reich. Upon visiting the collection, Hitler would write this, I knew with immediacy that this was an important moment in my life. I stood there quietly gazing upon it for several minutes, quite oblivious to the scene around me. It seemed to carry some kind of hidden inner meaning which evaded me, a meaning which I felt and I inwardly knew, yet could not bring to consciousness. I felt as though I myself had held it in my hands before in some earlier century of history, that I myself had once claimed it as my talisman of power and held the destiny of the world in my hands. What sort of madness was this that was invading my mind and creating such turmoil in my breast? 26 years later, on March 12, 1938, Hitler rode into Vienna to claim it for the Third Reich, the same day as he annexed Austria. It was shipped via an armored SS train to Nuremberg. Heinrich Himmler, the notorious leader of the SS, was documented later founding the Ahnenerbe. The Ahnenerbe was a registered study group for primordial intellectual history and German German ancestral heritage. Himmler took it upon himself to find funding for this, made himself present at meetings to make sure things were done right, found archaeologists, historians, and researchers by the dozens, and he sent them to dig up historical sites to find relics and to find the bones of Henry I, among others. Henry I was greatly admired by Himmler as the founder of Germany, And he allegedly believed himself to be a direct descendant of... Himmler took over the church where Henry had once housed his collection of relics, and it was there that he composed and performed SS religious style ceremonies. After the Nazi renovation of the famous Castle Wewelsburg, Himmler had rooms outfitted to fit his favorite eras of German history. He slept in the Henry I room. When Hitler seized the spear from the Habsburg treasury in Vienna, Himmler hoped that Hitler would give him the lance, but all he received was a copy. The real one was taken to St. Catherine Cathedral in Nuremberg, the city where it had originally resided in during the First Reich. The lance was exhibited at rallies held in Nuremberg in 1938 and 39. Towards the end of the war, on April 20, 1945, General Mark Clark of the U.S. Seventh Army discovered a lance underneath the Nuremberg Fortress. Some interesting conspiracy theories and rumors say that when Hitler lost possession of the spear, he committed suicide in the bunker underneath Berlin. Others say that the Nazis in fact made multiple duplicates of the spear, and the one that was found was indeed not the true spear of destiny. Others that the Nazis never possessed the spear at all, but rather a clone of the original. No one can say for sure, but the majority of the claims have been disproven. The copy of the lance that Otto the Great gave to the Polish people is still in Krakow Cathedral today. The Armenian lance is still in full possession of the Armenians, and the shaft of the original lance is still in possession of the Vatican. But the lance of Antioch, the one found by the Crusaders, has been lost to history, as has the lance of Constantine. So what happened to the real Spear of Destiny? No one knows for sure. It seems to have been lost to the sands of time But what does matter is faith. Faith that began over 2,000 years ago on a desolate hill outside of Jerusalem with the execution of a carpenter from Nazareth named Jesus. If you guys enjoyed the video, please give it a like and subscribe to our channel. Also leave us a comment below letting us know what you thought and what you'd like to see next. We really appreciate you guys taking the time to check out our content and we have a lot more planned for the future. As always, thank you so much and have yourself a wonderful day.