Date

Circa 1910

This crown was stolen in 1921. Suithila was "the first Gothic ruler to claim dominion over all of Spain" according to Isidore of Seville in the Historia Gothorum. The Treasure of Guarrazar is an archeological find composed of twenty-six votive crowns and gold crosses that had originally been offered to the Roman Catholic Church by the Kings of the Visigoths in the seventh century in Hispania, as a gesture of the orthodoxy of their faith and their submission to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Visigoths ruled in Gaul and the Iberian peninsula, primarily from the fifth to the seventh centuries CE. It was found in La Fuente de Guarrazar, near Toledo, in 1858. One of the crowns in Madrid has a jewelled chain bearing the name of the last Visigothic king, Recceswinth (652-672 CE). These ornately jewelled crowns decorated with opus interrasile (openwork), repoussé and chasing show Byzantine influence in style and technique, which was typical for the Migration period. The treasure was divided, with some objects going to the Musée de Cluny in Paris and the rest to the Armory of the Palacio Real in Madrid (today in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain).