Imperial Armoury
Together with the armoury at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck, which is also a member of the KHM museum group (KHM-Museumsverband), it houses the arms assembled by the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty.
First published in 1601, the Armamentarium Heroicum—an illustrated inventory of the Ambras "Armoury of Heroes" that forms the core of the Imperial Armoury—is the oldest museum catalogue in the world.
Thanks to the extensive publications of former directors such as Wendelin Boeheim and Bruno Thomas, the collection is also regarded as a cornerstone of modern scholarship on arms and armour.
After 1547, as regent of Bohemia, Ferdinand II amassed an extensive collection of military, sporting, and ceremonial weapons as part of his lavish court culture.
Here, he brought together arms and armour associated with renowned European and non-European warriors of the past and present, together with their portraits and biographies, thereby claiming their legacy as his own.
The most important testimony is Jakob Schrenck von Notzing's Armamentarium Heroicum, which contains 125 engravings of the archduke's "heroes" in their respective armours alongside their printed biographies.
In the fifteenth century, the Habsburgs‘ holdings of arms and armour in Vienna were housed in the so-called Ungarische Hof on the corner of Augustinerstraße and Dorotheergasse.
Between 1759 and 1771, under Empress Maria Theresa, Nikolaus Unterriedmüller created a museum on the site, which was a combination of an Habsburg hall of fame and an armoury for practical use.
In 1765, with Joseph II‘s accession, the arms and armour of the Styrian-Hungarian line of the Habsburgs, which had been independent between 1546 and 1619, were transferred from Graz to the imperial arsenal in Vienna.
After the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, the French confiscated precious pieces of artillery and armour, which were transferred to the Musée de l'Armée in Paris.
[9] The resulting gaps were filled during the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and an important illustrated inventory was subsequently created by Paul Löbhardt and Mathias Waniek in 1817/19.
After considerable sales of obsolete mass-produced military goods, its contents were joined with the Ambras Collection from the Lower Belvedere at the newly built Imperial Arsenal on the outskirts of the city.
[12] Curated by Wendelin Boeheim, the collection centered on older holdings from the period up to the Thirty Years' War, especially the personal arms of the Habsburg family.
[14] After numerous sales of "duplicates" in 1925/26, almost 100 objects were ceded to the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, as a result of the peace settlement with Hungary after World War I (for instance, the boy's armour of Sigismund II Augustus of Poland).
[21] In 2022, the exhibition "Iron Men - Fashion in Steel" was shown, in which armour and weapons were presented in the light of historical rituals, symbols and gender roles.
