First century
The piercing of Christ’s side is recorded in the Gospel of John. No relic is mentioned; no spear is kept. The object enters history only as a sentence.
Fourth to sixth centuries
As pilgrimage to Jerusalem grows, so does the trade in relics. A lance is shown to pilgrims in the city, and reports of it begin to circulate in the writings of travelers and chroniclers. The object now has a location, and locations can be lost, moved, and claimed again.
Seventh to thirteenth centuries
Relics gather at Constantinople, the great clearing-house of Christendom’s holy objects. A point of the lance is venerated there for centuries. With the sack of the city and the long unravelling that follows, its treasures scatter westward — and the single lance becomes, in effect, several.
Medieval Europe
The Vienna lance takes its place among the Imperial Regalia, carried at coronations as a sign that earthly rule and sacred history were meant to be held in the same hand. It is in this period that the lance acquires its political weight — the idea that to possess it is to possess a kind of legitimacy.
The modern legend
By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the relic has largely passed out of devotion and into myth. The phrase Spear of Destiny takes hold: the notion of a single all-powerful lance whose owner cannot be defeated and whose loss is ruin. It is good material for fiction, and fiction has used it generously. The historical relics, meanwhile, remain where they have long been — quiet, contested, and far less dramatic than the stories told about them.