Dynastic History | Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, Vienna — The Regalia Arrived Ahead of an Army

They were not Habsburg property. The crown, the sceptre, the orb, the imperial cross and the coronation vestments belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, and the free imperial city of Nuremberg had held them since a privilege granted by Sigismund in 1423 — custody rather than ownership, with an obligation to carry them to each coronation and bring them home afterwards. That arrangement held until 1796, when the city's officials moved the principal pieces out ahead of the French army, first to Regensburg, where the Reichstag sat. In 1800 they were taken on to Vienna and deposited in the imperial treasury on the order of Franz II. The Aachen pieces, among them St Stephen's Purse and the sabre called Charlemagne's, travelled separately and reached Vienna around the same years.

Six years later the empire itself was wound up. Franz II laid down the imperial title in 1806 and continued as Franz I of Austria, and the regalia stayed in Vienna, in the collection of a house that no longer held the office they had been made for. Nuremberg did not get them back. In 1938, after the Anschluss, Hitler had them returned there; they were displayed in the Katharinenkirche and later stored in the art bunker under the castle, and American occupation forces handed them to the Austrian federal government in Vienna in early 1946.

They are in the Schweizerhof wing of the Hofburg now, in a museum with a ticket desk and a cloakroom.

📸 Cover: the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire in its case in the Vienna treasury, Gryffindor, public domain via Wikimedia Commons