Fragments of this art of Wamba's days may be seen in the ruined church of San Genes, in the bath of the Cava, never a bath, where never the legendary Florinda bathed, and in the wall of a house in the _calle Lechuga_, as well as in the façade of the Bridge of Alcántara. In the beginning of Gothic rule it was chiefly architecture that flourished, but Wamba's immediate predecessors, we have seen, preferred literature and libraries, cultivated poetry, the epistolary art, and such research as the obscure times afforded, which they called science, and founded colleges. Their costume was half Roman, since they borrowed what they knew of civilisation from the Romans. They wore silk embroidered cloaks, let their hair grow long, like their Merovingian brethren, to mark their superiority to the short-cropped Celt-Iberians they had conquered; the women wore costly habits and splendid jewels, and all the nobles drank from golden cups and washed in silver basins. The value and beauty of their goldsmiths' work are abundantly testified by the nine great votive crowns in the Musée de Cluny, where the famous treasure of Guarrazar is preserved. These magnificent gold crowns of the seventh century were discovered near Toledo in 1858 by a French officer who owned the property _La Fuente de Guarrazar_ where these historic crowns were buried. They were probably buried at the time of Tarik's invasion, and remained nearly eight centuries underground. The most important, as well as the largest and most beautiful, is the crown which bears the inscription in letters of gold cloisonné and incrusted, RECCESVINTHUS REX OFFERET. To show the value of the workmanship of this crown, I cannot do better than quote here in full its official description in the catalogue of the Musée Cluny by M. du Sommerard: "King Recesvinthus' crown is composed of a large and massive golden band. It opens with a double hinge, and is richly framed by two borders of gold cloisonné, and incrusted with red Carian stones, those which Anastasius calls _gemmis alabandinsis_, and in relief has thirty Oriental sapphires of the greatest beauty set in golden borders, mostly of considerable dimension. Thirty-five pearls of a no less notable size alternate with the sapphires on a golden ground incrusted with the same stones, and twenty-four little gold chains, starting from the lower circle of the crown, suspend large letters in gold cloisonné and incrusted, whose disposition form the words: RECCESVINTHUS REX OFFERET. Each of these letters ends with a pendant of gold and fine pearls holding a pear of rose sapphire. The king's crown is suspended by a quadruple chain of beautiful workmanship which attaches it to a double gem of massive gold enriched with twelve pendants in sapphire, and this gem, whose branches are open, is surmounted by a capital in rock-crystal, finely wrought; then comes a ball of the same material, and then a golden stem which forms the starting point of the suspension.