Treasure of Pouan

The "Treasure of Pouan" consists of a number of gold and garnet cloisonné jewels and ornaments, buried with a skeleton uncovered in 1842 at Pouan-les-Vallées and identified as the burial of a 5th-century Germanic warrior.

The antiquarian who first described this find, Achille Peigné-Delacourt (1797–1881),[2] optimistically claimed that the elite burial could be that of Theodoric I, the Visigoth king, who had undisputedly been slain in the nearby Battle of Châlons.

According to Peigné-Delacourt's theory, the corpse had been hastily interred by his followers, who meant to recover it, and that the body recovered and buried with ceremony at Tolosa (present-day Toulouse), the body described by Jordanes[3] as found beneath a mound of corpses and borne away with heroic songs in sight of the enemy, was not actually that of Theodoric.

Aëtius convinced Theodoric's son Thorismund to return home swiftly and secure the throne for himself before his brothers could begin a civil war.

John Man describes the motivation imagined by Peigné-Delacourt, In the last century, professional historians Thomas Hodgkin[5] and later J.B.