Imperial Treasury (Kaiserliche Schatzkammer)

Museum · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

Dim vaulted rooms in Vienna's oldest palace courtyard holding the crown of an empire that never had a capital and no longer exists.

The Imperial Treasury holds the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, eight gold plates hinged together into a rough octagon. It sits in low vaulted rooms off the Schweizerhof, the oldest courtyard of the Hofburg, where there is no daylight at all. The rooms are kept dim and only the cases are lit, so the gold shows up from across the room. Almost everything is small and behind glass, so you look at close range. The empire elected its rulers and had no capital, so the crown never had a home. It travelled instead, and for most of four centuries it lay locked away in Nuremberg, coming out only when somebody was being crowned. It was carried east in 1796 ahead of the French armies and reached Vienna in 1800; six years later the empire was dissolved and it simply stayed. The Habsburgs kept their own treasure in these same rooms, including the robes of the Order of the Golden Fleece, inherited from the dukes of Burgundy. Look for the late Roman agate bowl: it was long taken for the Holy Grail.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look for the Schweizerhof, the small inner courtyard behind the red-and-black Swiss Gate — The treasury door is small and plain, and people often cross the courtyard twice before they spot it.
Save your attention for the far rooms — The route opens with Habsburg court pieces and family jewels, and the crown and the holy lance come several rooms further in.
Read the four picture plates on the crown, not only the stones — They show Christ and three kings from the Bible. Beside Solomon the words read: fear the Lord and turn from evil.
Look hard at the coloured stones on the crown — Eleven of them are glass, not gems. That only became clear when conservators worked through the crown stone by stone.
Photograph without flash and brace your hands before you shoot — Tripods are not allowed here. The cases are bright and the rooms around them are dark, so anything hand-held blurs easily.

Things to do

1
Read the crown from the front, then from the side
Stand square to the case first. A big blue sapphire sits at the top of the front plate, where the cross is fixed. It stands where a famous stone called the Waise, the orphan, is thought to have been. Then step aside to find the hinge pins that once let the crown be taken apart.
2
Walk the hem of the coronation mantle
The mantle is about three and a half metres across, so walk its length instead of standing in front of the middle. On each side a lion is pulling a camel down, with a palm tree between them. Then follow the Arabic band along the curved hem. The red comes from a dye made with insects.
3
Catch the letters in the agate bowl
The bowl is cut from a single block of agate, close to sixty centimetres across without its handles. Step along the case and watch the banded rim from several angles. In the right light the stone's own veining forms shapes that were read as XRISTO, the name of Christ. Nobody carved them.
4
Find the unicorn horn that is not one
A narwhal tusk stands in one of the cases, well over two metres long, with the spiral grooves that matched every drawing of a unicorn's horn. The Polish king Sigismund II Augustus sent it to Ferdinand I in 1540. Ferdinand's sons later ruled that it could never leave the family.