Royal Armoury

Forget the oil paintings hanging on the walls; the Royal Armoury of the Royal Palace of Madrid is the true heartbeat of “Hearts of Iron.” Housing the world’s most lethal and lavish haute couture, it is the only sanctuary of metallic art that can fiercely rival the Imperial Armoury of Vienna.

Stepping into this space, you are hit with a double whammy of blinding metallic glint and the cold scent of death. This is no ordinary blacksmith’s shop; it showcases the absolute top-tier gear of the Spanish royal family from the 13th to the 19th century, particularly the personal closets of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II. Zoom your focus in on those maddeningly complex suits of armor, especially Charles V’s legendary “Mühlberg Armor.” The hair-thin gold engravings (damascening) on its surface depict mythological heroes slaying monsters. In an era without machine tools, craftsmen used microscopic chisels to carve grooves into hard steel, then painstakingly hammered in pure gold wire. Even crazier is that to maintain agility on horseback, the hinges at the joints of these full-body suits, weighing dozens of kilograms, were designed with more precision than the gears of a modern luxury watch. The numerous child-sized armors in here are particularly chilling—tailor-made for princes barely a few years old. They serve as a grim reminder that royal succession back then was always accompanied by bloody assassinations and real warfare; royal kids were stuffed into these iron cans of power the moment they learned to walk.

In this armoury, the function of a “bulletproof vest” was actually a tiny fraction of its purpose; these were essentially the “haute couture suits and supercars” of their day. The emperor didn’t wear them to actually hack people to pieces on the front lines. He wore them to ride a massive stallion through the plaza under the blazing sun, using the blinding glare and gold engravings to broadcast to every local peasant and enemy spy: I am filthy rich, I am incredibly lethal, and God is absolutely on my side.

If you had to pick one piece from this entire jungle of metal to wear to a masquerade ball, would you boldly choose that bizarre suit of iron armor specifically tailored for a hunting dog?

The establishment of this armoury coincided with the absolute zenith of the Spanish Empire’s Golden Age. In the 16th century, flush with mountains of silver discovered in the Americas, the Spanish kings were obscenely wealthy. They recklessly squandered this wealth extracted from the New World to commission these luxurious killing machines from Milan in Italy and Augsburg in Germany (the undisputed capitals of European weapon forging at the time).

However, this ultimate romance of the cold weapon era was mercilessly crushed by the rise of gunpowder. The most dramatic irony lies with Charles V himself: this emperor, who collected endless suits of magnificent armor, suffered so terribly from gout in his later years that doing anything, let alone wearing dozens of pounds of iron, was excruciatingly painful. He eventually abdicated to die in a remote monastery. Meanwhile, his glowing battle suits, which witnessed endless conquests and immortalized him via Titian’s brush, were left behind as ghosts in this giant storage room, silently watching the empire slowly age and decay as the Age of Discovery drew to a close.