Visigoth in the context of "Aissó"

The Treasure of Guarrazar, Guadamur, Province of Toledo, Castile-La Mancha, Spain, is an archeological find composed of twenty-six votive crowns and gold crosses that had originally been offered to the Catholic Church by the Kings Visigoths in the seventh century in Hispania, as a gesture of the orthodoxy of their faith and their submission to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The most valuable of all is the votive crown of king Recceswinth with its blue sapphires from Sri Lanka and pendilia. Though the treasure is now divided and much has disappeared, it represents the best surviving group of Early Medieval Christian votive offerings.

The treasure, which represents the high point of Visigothic gold craftsmanship, was dug between 1858 and 1861 in an orchard called Guarrazar, in Guadamur, very close to Toledo, Spain. The treasure was divided, with some objects going to the Musée de Cluny in Paris and the rest to the armouries of the Palacio Real in Madrid (today in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain). In 1921 and 1936, some items of the Treasure of Guarrazar were stolen and have disappeared.

The 5th century is the time period from AD 401 (represented by the Roman numerals CDI) through AD 500 (D) in accordance with the Julian calendar. The 5th century is noted for being a period of migration and political instability throughout Eurasia.

It saw the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which came to a formal end in 476 AD. This empire had been ruled by a succession of weak emperors, with the real political might being increasingly concentrated among military leaders. Internal instability allowed a Visigoth army to reach and ransack Rome in 410. Some recovery took place during the following decades, but the Western Empire received another serious blow when a second foreign group, the Vandals, occupied Carthage, capital of an extremely important province in Africa. Attempts to retake the province were interrupted by the invasion of the Huns under Attila. After Attila's defeat, both Eastern and Western empires joined forces for a final assault on Vandal North Africa, but this campaign was a spectacular failure.

Leander of Seville (Spanish: Leandro de Sevilla; Latin: Leandrus; c. 534 AD – 13 March 600 or 601) was a Hispano-Roman Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Seville. He was instrumental in effecting the conversion of the Visigothic kings Hermenegild and Reccared to Catholicism. His brother (and successor as bishop) was the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville.

Pendilia (singular pendilium; from Latin pendulus, hanging) or pendoulia (the Greek equivalent), are pendants or dangling ornaments hanging from a piece of metalwork such as a crown, votive crown, crux gemmata, or kamelaukion, and are a feature of Early Medieval goldsmith work. On crosses the pendilia may include the letters alpha and omega, and on votive offerings, which were often designed to be hung over altars and where pendilia are at their largest and most spectacular, they may spell out whole words (see illustration).

The term is commonly used in coin collecting. Pendilia are depicted on coins as jewels or pearls hanging from the sides of the crown, and occur frequently on coins of Byzantine emperors. The pendilia which hung from the Emperors' crowns began with Marcian. Although the years saw the styles of crown change, the pendilia remained, at least through Manuel II Palaiologos. Surviving crowns with pendilia include the Holy Crown of Hungary and many votive crowns of the Treasure of Guarrazar from Visigothic Spain.

The Bellonids (Catalan: Bel·lònides, Spanish: Bellónidas, French: Bellonides), sometimes called the Bellonid Dynasty, were the counts descended from the Goth Belló who ruled in Carcassonne, Urgell, Cerdanya, County of Conflent, Barcelona, and numerous other Hispanic and Gothic march counties in the 9th and 10th centuries. His most famous grandson was Wilfred the Hairy, who founded the House of Barcelona, rulers of the County of Barcelona from 878, and since 1164 the Crown of Aragon, until the end of the reign of Martin the Humane in 1410.

Since the early years of the 10th century all of the eastern counties of the Hispanic March and the counties of Conflent, Carcassonne, Foix, and Razès of the Gothic March were ruled by Belló's descendants. This would have favored the co-ruling of some territories, and a clan-like network of mutual support, although they would have also been exposed to the risk of endogamy.

Spanish art has been an important contributor to Western art and Spain has produced many famous and influential artists including Velázquez, Goya and Picasso. Spanish art was particularly influenced by France and Italy during the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, but Spanish art has often had very distinctive characteristics, partly explained by the Moorish heritage in Spain (especially in Andalusia), and through the political and cultural climate in Spain during the Counter-Reformation and the subsequent eclipse of Spanish power under the Bourbon dynasty.

The prehistoric art of Spain had many important periods-it was one of the main centres of European Upper Paleolithic art and the rock art of the Spanish Levant in the subsequent periods. In the Iron Age large parts of Spain were a centre for Celtic art, and Iberian sculpture has a distinct style, partly influenced by coastal Greek settlements. Spain was conquered by the Romans by 200 BC and Rome was rather smoothly replaced by the Germanic Visigoths in the 5th century AD, who soon Christianized. The relatively few remains of Visigothic art and architecture show an attractive and distinct version of wider European trends. With the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the 8th century there was a notable Moorish presence in art specially in Southern Iberia. Over the following centuries the wealthy courts of Al-Andalus produced many works of exceptional quality, culminating in the Alhambra in Granada, right at the end of Muslim Spain.

The Third Council of Toledo (589) marks the entry of Visigothic Spain into the Catholic Church, and is known for codifying the filioque clause into Western Christianity. The council also enacted restrictions on Jews, and the conversion of the country to Catholic Christianity led to repeated conflict with the Jews.

Mozarabic chant (also known as the Hispanic chant, Old Hispanic chant, Old Spanish chant, or Visigothic chant) is the liturgical plainchant repertory of the Visigothic/Mozarabic rite of the Catholic Church, related to the Gregorian chant. It is primarily associated with Hispania under Visigothic rule and later with the Mozarabs (Hispanic Catholic Christians living under Islamic rule and speaking Arabic) and was replaced by the chant of the Roman rite following the Christian Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Although its original medieval form is largely lost, a few chants have survived with readable musical notation, and the chanted rite was later revived in altered form and continues to be used in a few isolated locations in Spain, primarily in Toledo.

An alcázar (from Arabic: القصر, romanized: al-qaṣr, lit. 'the fort'; see below) is a type of Islamic castle or palace in Spain built during Muslim rule between the 8th and 15th centuries. They functioned as homes and regional capitals for governmental figures throughout the Umayyad caliphate and later for Christian rulers following the Iberian Reconquista. The term alcázar is also used for many medieval castles built by Christians on earlier Roman, Visigothic or Islamic fortifications and is frequently used as a synonym for castillo or castle. In Latin America there are also several colonial palaces called alcázars.