Clothing and Personal Adornment in the Visigothic Kingdom

Across the Iberian Peninsula, present-day Spain and Portugal, and southern Gaul, now southern France, clothing in the Visigothic kingdom from the fifth through seventh centuries is best known through the metal fittings that fastened it. Wool or flax could be spun into thread, woven into cloth, then cut, sewn and repaired. Cloth is perishable and generally survives less well than metal, glass and stone. Spinning turns fibres into thread; brooches and belt buckles show how garments and belts were arranged and decorated.

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Pins, belts and the dressed body

A brooch, also called a fibula, is a pin fastener that holds fabric together. A buckle closes a belt: its tongue passes through a hole in the strap, while an attached plate can create a broad decorated surface at the waist. Their positions in graves help reconstruct how selected clothes were worn. At Estagel in the eastern Pyrenees of present-day France, excavators uncovered about 200 burials. A woman in grave 8 had a large buckle plate at her waist and a bronze bow-shaped brooch on her left shoulder, so the two fittings served different parts of the outfit.

The Estagel buckle plate, about 475–550, measured 12.7 by 6.8 centimetres. Its blue and yellow glass was set into compartments formed by thin upright walls, a technique called cloisonné. The compartments made an eight-pointed star; the end of the buckle tongue was shaped as a stylized snake head. The shoulder brooch carried glass and spiral designs. A necklace at the woman’s neck contained three ribbed glass beads and a small coin of Constantine. In grave 117, a second woman was buried with two asymmetrical bird-headed brooches on her torso, along with beads and small iron and copper-alloy buckles, including one from a shoe. These placements show that metalwork fastened both clothing and accessories worn at different points on the body.

Casting and decorating belt fittings

A bronze buckle from Haza de la Torre, near Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain, dates from the late sixth to seventh century. It was cast in a mould as a rigid plate without a hinge. Two openings served different purposes: the round one caught the buckle tongue, and the longer one admitted the belt strap. Four soldered rings attached the plate to the belt. After casting, a craftworker chiselled its outer face with two mythical gryphons, creatures with lion bodies and eagle heads, drinking from a fountain. The Jerez museum interprets this scene as a symbol of resurrection.

Decoration could also make a buckle an unmistakable display of wealth. A 550–600 copper-alloy buckle in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is inlaid with garnets, glass, lapis lazuli and probable cuttlefish bone. Its red garnets cover most of the surface, while lapis lazuli forms the borders. The combination of costly materials and skilled setting made the fastening conspicuous when worn at the waist.

Regional combinations and later finds

Fifth- and sixth-century graves in southern France and Spain show dress combinations changing across regions and generations. At Duratón, near Segovia in central Spain, a late fifth-century male grave combined a Mediterranean-style cloisonné buckle with a crescent-shaped earring associated with eastern European forms. In the decades around 500, women in the Segovia region wore pairs of large sheet-metal brooches on the chest with a large composite belt buckle. From the second third of the sixth century, medium-sized brooches were cast, while larger examples gave way to locally made radiating, carved bow brooches. This Segovia sequence shows how dress forms changed through local production and contact with regional traditions.

Two seventh-century belt buckles from Los Villaricos were excavated in a cemetery at a Roman villa near Mula in southeastern Spain. The cemetery had developed beside a former dining hall that became a religious building. The buckles resemble Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, forms found around the Mediterranean. Radiocarbon dates anchor their archaeological context, while technical and metal analysis suggests that they were made in a workshop in Iberia. Their forms link local production with a design language shared across the Mediterranean.

Monastic clothing under Isidore

At the start of the seventh century, Isidore, bishop of Seville, set rules for monks’ clothing: they could own up to two outer garments, wear bed socks only in winter or when travelling, and had to cut their hair at the same time and in the same style. Clothing and grooming formed part of the monastery’s shared discipline.