The Holy Lance - Chapter 7 cont.

Simon had some questions by this stage. He was as much of a fan of conspiracy theories as the next man, but this was all taking it a bit too far. “But most of these things are fakes, if they ever existed. All the tests prove beyond doubt that these treasures we still have are copies, they’re not the originals. If there were any originals to begin with.”

“What better way to keep them safe than to tell everyone they are worthless? You are right, every so often, these treasures are tested by science, and science always pronounces them fake. ‘They were made far too late for them to be authentic’ the reports always say. We all know this. But Simon, think. Would you bother to steal something you thought was a fake? The best safety for these objects is for people to think them fakes. We know something of manipulating the minds of man.” Another chuckle, less avuncular this time, more cynical.

Simon took his point, but was not satisfied. “OK, say that’s true, why are some of the treasures on display and others hidden or lost?”

“It depends on the culture they come from. Some of the pieces have always been on display, others have always been hidden. The Order seeks only to protect the objects, not to control access to them. If they have been on display, let them remain so. If the world thinks them lost, let them stay hidden. Think of the risks if ,say, Excalibur suddenly appeared. The sword of King Arthur, with all its mystical power. What thief in the world could resist an object like that?”

“But isn’t it a risk, leaving some of these treasures in the public domain as it were?”

‘Yes, as the Spear shows, it was. But having been on display for so long, we decided that removing it would cause more trouble than it was worth. If the public could no longer see it, they would start to look for it and the last thing we wanted was some treasure hunter blundering his way across it.”

“What’s the story with the spear? I don’t know too much about it.”

“The Spear of Destiny, the Habsburg Lance or, to give it it’s proper name, the Spear of Longinus, is the spear which the centurion Longinus used to pierce the side of Christ on the cross. According to St John, the Jews did not want the bodies to remain on the cross overnight as the next day was the sabbath. The Romans broke the legs of the two thieves crucified with Jesus, to hasten their deaths, but when they came to Christ, they thought he was already dead. To make sure he was, the centurion took his spear and pierced his side. Out of the wound poured blood and water. Longinus himself took this as a miracle, although modern science has other ideas, and became one of the first Christians, moving into exile in North Africa.

There the lance remained for the next several hundred years, allowing other “relics” to take its place, until the Moorish expansion drove the family into exile in Italy. Seeking a guarantee for their safety, they offered their most prize possession to the Lombard King who ruled the area around Milan. At that point, the Lance became part of the regalia of the kings and was used when Charlemagne was crowned in 774. From that point, it belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor and was kept in the royal treasury, first in Prague, then in Nuremburg when the capital moved there in 1424. It stayed there peacefully for 300 years, an object of devotion and a sign of power.

And then came Napoleon. He was obsessed with power, obsessed with the occult - why else did he spend so much time messing around in Egypt? He was looking for the wisdom of the ancients. Ha. He found nothing.”

Simon was about to interject that Napoleon had found the Rosetta stone, allowing the decryption of hieroglyphs, and started Egyptology as a serious field of study, so the expedition could not be called a total loss, but felt the old man was on a roll and let him continue.

“However, he returned to Europe and turned his attention elsewhere, there were plenty of relics he could still acquire. In those days, every cathedral had something important, bones from saints and the like, but only one had the spear. And so he marched on Nuremburg. The council panicked and sent the spear, and the rest of the imperial regalia to Austria, to the Habsburgs for safe keeping. Where they remained, safe from the Corsican megalomaniac. After the threat receded, the Nuremburgers asked for them back, but what could one city do against the might of the Austro-Hungarian empire?”

“Didn’t Hitler take it after the anschluss?” Simon was beginning to remember some of the legend now, the product of a television documentary which promised answers but left only questions.

“Some people think that the Spear caused Hitler. He certainly saw it when he was a painter in Vienna, and it does seem to have obsessed him from that point on. You see, the Spear is, forgive the pun, double edged. It gives great power, but sometimes at the cost of sanity. But you are right, when Germany and Austria were united in 1938, one of Hitler’s first acts was to have the Spear moved to Berlin.

“But the good councilors of Nuremburg were not the only ones who could forsee danger. The Order arranged for a replica of the Spear to be made, and the night before the Germans crossed the border, it was swapped and the original spent the war safely hidden in an alpine barn, sharing its home with the cows while the mad corporal thought he owned the original. The Americans and their General Patton were kind enough to return it after the war, but they did not realise they were only handing back a 7 year old fake. Ah the Americans, so literal sometimes.”