The caliga was among the most recognisable pieces of Roman military equipment in the early Empire. It was a leather shoe with an open, strap-cut upper and a thick sole reinforced by iron nails. Its plural, caligae, is often translated as “sandals,” though the surviving footwear is closer in construction to a strong laced shoe than to a modern thin-soled sandal. Roman soldiers spent much of their service on foot, crossing roads, rough tracks, exposed rock and fields while carrying their equipment. Their footwear had to stand up to that work.
The iron studs in the soles, known as hobnails, often outlast the leather in archaeological deposits. The nails bound layers of sole leather together and presented a more wear-resistant surface to the ground. They could offer a firmer purchase in some conditions, but they were not equally effective on every surface. An account of a centurion slipping on stone during the siege of Jerusalem shows that a useful military shoe could still let its wearer down.
Worn and patched soles, leather offcuts, scattered nails and impressions on once-soft surfaces preserve evidence of manufacture, use and repair. Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain, has yielded shoes in many styles and sizes, belonging to soldiers as well as other inhabitants of the settlement. The finds allow us to follow footwear through manufacture, daily use, repair and disposal.
What were caligae, and who wore them?
In Roman usage, the caliga was closely associated with the ordinary soldier. The openwork style familiar today is especially well documented in the late Republic and early Empire, notably in the first century CE, when Roman troops held permanent bases along frontiers such as the Rhine. Legionaries were citizen soldiers, while auxiliary troops were recruited from a wider range of communities. Both groups needed dependable shoes. Neither wore a single identical design across every province and century: even one excavated military settlement can contain several varieties of footwear.
The ancient name does not always correspond neatly to the shape in a modern drawing. Latin authors might refer to footwear in ways that conveyed profession or status rather than technical construction. Archaeologists can examine surviving leather to identify how an upper was cut, where its laces passed, how its heel was formed and how its sole was assembled. They usually cannot know which word the original owner used. Shoes from streets and forts can share construction features, so the place where one is found does not establish whether its wearer was a soldier or a civilian.
The connection between caligae and military identity left a mark on Roman history. Gaius, the future emperor known as Caligula, received his nickname as a small boy among the troops commanded in Germany by his father Germanicus. Suetonius, Life of Caligula 9, says the soldiers gave him the name because he wore a miniature military outfit. “Caligula” is derived from caliga and means roughly “little boot.” The anecdote shows how readily Romans recognised the soldier’s footwear, though it tells us nothing definite about who supplied or manufactured the army’s shoes.
Rank could also be conveyed through footwear in Roman art. Men depicted as ordinary soldiers commonly wear practical shoes, whereas officers may appear in more elaborate, enclosed types. Yet sculpture is a selective representation of military dress, not an equipment register from a campaign. An artist working on a ceremonial monument might follow conventions of status or combine details from different types of uniform. Excavated leather remains essential for understanding what people actually wore.
The meaning of caliga did not remain fixed, either. Later Latin uses of the term need not describe the openwork shoe familiar from the first century. When classifying archaeological footwear, construction and securely dated contexts are more reliable than assuming that the same word always designated exactly the same object.
How a Roman military shoe was made
Making a caliga began with prepared animal hide. Strong leather was needed for the sole, while the upper had to bend around the foot. In the characteristic openwork design, the maker cut openings and connected straps from the upper leather, then drew them together with laces to secure the shoe. Some examples have reinforced heels; others show different strap patterns and fastenings. The challenge was to keep the shoe firmly in place on uneven ground without making it so rigid that the foot could no longer move naturally.
Under the foot, several layers formed the sole. Archaeological examples preserve different arrangements of inner and outer leather, stitching and iron fasteners. One first-century caliga in the London Museum still retains part of its lacing system and some hobnails. The museum gives its length as 260 millimetres and records how straps drawn from opposite sides met over the foot. These details, preserved in an actual shoe, provide a more dependable guide to proportions and fastening than an illustration based on a generic Roman soldier.
A thick sole still had to bend as its wearer walked. Too many nails in the wrong places might interfere with that movement, while too few fastenings could let the leather layers separate. The surviving arrangement may reflect the original shoemaker’s work, but it could also include later repairs. A missing nail might have fallen out in use, corroded or disappeared during excavation. Complete soles therefore give more information than isolated clusters of iron. Even they reveal individual choices rather than a standard pattern imposed throughout the empire.
Hobnails were driven through the sole layers, leaving their heads projecting beneath the walking surface and their points held securely within the leather. Makers could reinforce the edge, heel and front of a shoe with different arrangements of nails, while an insole protected the wearer’s foot from the fastenings. The number and placement vary across finds. No surviving evidence justifies a single universal nail count or a regulation hobnailing design for every Roman army shoe.
Before any cutting or stitching, the leather itself required skilled preparation. Carol van Driel-Murray’s study of Roman footwear discusses vegetable tanning, a process that stabilised hides and helped preserve some Roman leather in waterlogged, oxygen-poor deposits. This technology was also important in the development of distinctive Roman shoemaking traditions in north-western Europe. The iron nails are conspicuous, but their usefulness depended on leather made through a much longer sequence of work.
A workshop needed supplies of hides, patterns, awls, thread or other stitching material, iron nails and people trained to use them. Soldiers could undertake straightforward maintenance, but making a shoe was specialist work. Roman London has yielded evidence of shoemaking in commercial streets, with tanning and similarly unpleasant processes more often associated with industrial districts. The London Museum’s repaired hobnailed sole also shows that at least some shoes were worth patching instead of discarding when they wore through.
Why put iron hobnails under a leather sole?
Each step wore down the material touching the ground. On an ordinary leather sole, the leather took that abrasion directly. With hobnails, some of the friction fell instead on the projecting iron heads, which could be replaced. The nails also held the layers together and sometimes gave better grip on rough ground. Fastening the leather, resisting wear and providing traction were related functions, but the nails did not perform all three equally well on every surface. Metal under a sole could help on one surface and make footing less secure on another.
The edge of a shoe could scrape against irregular ground, and its heel and forefoot experienced different pressures during walking. These considerations may help explain why nails are concentrated in certain parts of some surviving soles. They cannot support precise modern claims about the pressure carried by each ancient fastener. Fit, leather thickness, individual gait and ground conditions all affected performance. Experiments with reconstructed caligae are informative only to the extent that the reproductions resemble the archaeological originals they are intended to test.
The arrangement of hobnails also records choices made during manufacture and subsequent use. Some soles have dense groups of nails in particular areas; others preserve sparser or differently shaped patterns. Those differences may reflect the maker’s method, the intended use of the shoe, damage or repair. A design resembling a letter or military emblem is not, by itself, evidence that a particular legion issued it. A pattern could only be attributed to a particular military unit with further independent evidence.
A soldier’s fall on stone paving is recorded in Josephus, Jewish War 6.1.8 (6.81–85). During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the centurion Julianus advanced against opposing fighters and drove them back. Running over stone paving, he slipped. Josephus attributes the fall to the thick, sharp nails in his shoes, similar to those of other soldiers. Julianus was left exposed and killed. The historian presents this as the tragic reversal of a courageous attack, but in describing the accident he also records a practical weakness of hobnailed footwear.
Josephus’s account does not establish that caligae were badly suited to Roman roads in general. Smooth stone paving offered different conditions from packed gravel, rough stone or earth, and rain and mud could change how secure any surface felt. Nor do we have comparative tests showing that a caliga consistently gripped better than every other Roman shoe. The literary episode records one particular failure. Surviving footwear reveals construction and wear, but cannot measure performance across every condition an army encountered.
Roman marching distances and the demands on footwear
Roman campaigns depended on soldiers covering long distances, often repeatedly. Troops used established roads but also crossed rivers, followed tracks, climbed slopes and moved over temporary routes. The same shoes might be worn while travelling, building, standing guard or fighting. A durable pair had to survive that variety of tasks. The amount a soldier carried changed with his unit, duties, the terrain and the period, so no single modern estimate of pack weight should be treated as the load of every Roman marcher.
The late Roman military author Vegetius, Epitoma rei militaris 1.9, expected recruits in training to travel twenty Roman miles in five summer hours at the military pace, or twenty-four at a faster pace. A Roman mile was roughly 1.48 kilometres, making the distances approximately 29.6 and 35.5 kilometres. These figures belong to a late antique manual prescribing military discipline. They are not measurements of an average day’s march by the first-century soldiers whose caligae survive in archaeological collections.
A shoe that came apart on the road could slow its wearer and hinder a group that needed to move together. Vegetius’s emphasis on steady, organised marching also makes the practical need for footwear maintenance clear. He was setting out an ideal of collective training, not recording the achievements of individual long-distance walkers. His requirements cannot safely be applied as first-century regulations, since the relevant army footwear instructions from that earlier period have not survived.
Good footwear could only contribute to an army’s mobility. Soldiers also needed provisions, water, rest and a pace their units could sustain. Road conditions, weather, animals, wagons and military circumstances affected how fast a force moved. Footwear that protected feet and could be mended was useful within a campaign, but the army also depended on supply systems, roads, organisation and discipline.
The surfaces under Roman feet were far more varied than the neat stone paving familiar from photographs of ancient streets. Construction depended on local materials and conditions; many routes had compacted gravel or stone rather than a monumental paved surface. A soldier might leave a substantial highway and cross muddy ground on the approach to a fort later that day. The caliga’s everyday value lay in coping with different conditions, rather than providing perfect grip on one idealised type of road.
The shoes found at Vindolanda
At Vindolanda, unusually damp deposits preserved materials that would have decayed at many other Roman sites. Successive forts and settlements left layers of organic refuse, including thousands of leather objects. Vindolanda stands just south of Hadrian’s Wall, although its earliest occupation preceded the wall’s construction in the second century. Shoes from soldiers and civilians survive in exceptional quantities. The Vindolanda Archaeological Leather Project, run jointly by Western University and the Vindolanda Trust, reports collections containing more than 7,000 leather objects, over 4,000 of them shoes.
The people wearing those shoes were not all legionaries. Vindolanda was home to auxiliary garrisons, and women, children, servants, merchants and craftspeople also formed part of the fort’s community. Shoe sizes, construction and patterns of wear help bring that population into focus. The 2026 Bata Shoe Museum exhibition Unearthing Vindolanda presents children’s footwear alongside women’s and military shoes. Such finds make it impossible to identify every hobnailed sole from a fort as the possession of a soldier.
A fragmentary message provides a glimpse of how footwear and clothing reached people on the frontier. Vindolanda tablet 346, provisionally dated to about 104–120 CE, mentions a consignment including socks, sandals and undergarments. Parts of the text remain difficult to read, among them the beginning and the writer’s identity. The tablet is sometimes described as a letter from a soldier’s mother or wife, but that identification is not secure. What the fragment does show is that personal contacts could send garments and footwear to the settlement.
The shipment should be considered alongside evidence for military supply. A personal shipment does not mean the military never provided shoes; a military storehouse would not mean individuals never obtained their own. Both channels could operate alongside one another. Because some readings on the tablet are uncertain, even the exact number of socks remains unclear. Its particular value lies in being read with the leather finds: the text records a transaction, while the shoes show the range of objects actually used and discarded.
The Vindolanda assemblage includes open and closed shoes intended for different settings and activities. Its variety is difficult to reconcile with the idea of an army permanently equipped with one identical style. Changes in fashion, manufacturing traditions and date help explain some of the variety, while personal choice and the presence of civilian families explain more. Recovery from a military site places a shoe within the life of that settlement; it does not necessarily make the shoe part of a legionary’s marching kit.
How did Roman soldiers manage wet and cold feet?
A caliga’s cut straps left openings through which water could drain after a crossing and air could circulate around the foot. That may have been useful in warm conditions. It did not keep feet dry or protect them fully from cold, mud and rubbing: soles and skin still became wet, while exposed areas remained vulnerable. Archaeological footwear alone does not demonstrate that open caligae prevented blisters, fungal disease or trench foot. Such claims would need medical or controlled experimental evidence.
Roman footwear included many styles beyond the simple categories of “sandals” and “boots.” The London Museum’s collection of Roman shoes includes closed outdoor footwear and boots as well as open designs. This range is unsurprising in an empire extending across different climates, occupations and seasons. A design comfortable on a hot road need not have served equally well for someone guarding a post in northern Britain during winter.
The frontier documents also mention coverings for cold feet. The Vindolanda tablet mentions udones, the Latin term for socks, among items sent to the settlement. That establishes the availability of such coverings, but does not identify which soldiers wore them, how often or with what kind of shoe. Wrappings and socks could help protect the skin and keep it warmer, while shoes with more enclosed uppers offered another option. One damaged letter cannot define the winter equipment of the Roman army as a whole.
The fit of the individual shoe made a difference as well. Laces and straps allowed some adjustment, but a sole might be stiff and poorly fitting leather could rub the skin. A shoe already worn to the shape of its owner’s foot may have felt comfortable. We cannot, however, recover that person’s experience of comfort from the surviving leather or treat every archaeological design as equally pleasant to wear.
Nails, leather and repairs
The underside of a shoe wore against grit and hard ground while the upper stretched and bent at every step. Hobnails could loosen or corrode; straps tore; the heel or toe might wear more quickly than other areas. Those forms of damage make repairs an important part of the archaeological record. A hobnailed sole preserved in Roman London, now in the museum collection, has a leather patch at the front which may be a repair. If the patch was a repair, its owner or a leatherworker spent time and material keeping the shoe in service.
Large groups of discarded leather can show that shoemaking or maintenance took place, although they do not always reveal exactly how the work was organised. Offcuts may come from the production of new shoes or the repair of old ones. A collection of worn soles could represent a single clearance rather than years of gradual disposal. Where the deposit belongs securely to a known building phase, its meaning can be assessed more confidently. Older finds are still useful, but excavations without modern stratigraphic records limit what can be said about the activities behind them, including army supply.
Military footwear was not produced as one identical model for the entire empire. Shoes varied in pattern and size, and workshops near Roman settlements could manufacture or repair them. Making leather demanded animals, water, tanning materials and skilled labour; producing hobnails required ironworking and its own supply of raw materials. For a frontier garrison to remain adequately shod, it relied on connections with craftsmen and suppliers beyond the men serving in its units.
An important assemblage from Mainz shows the scale of that work. According to the Musée d’Archéologie nationale’s description, a nineteenth-century discovery produced twenty-one nearly complete caligae, three enclosed shoes and thousands of pieces of leather. Such a collection points to considerable manufacture, use, repair or disposal, rather than to a few accidentally lost pairs. Precisely how it formed is harder to establish, since nineteenth-century excavation did not record archaeological layers with the precision expected today.
There is no reliable standard lifespan for a Roman soldier’s shoes. A pair subjected to heavy marching might wear out quickly, while another could last longer through gentler use or repeated repairs. A claim that all caligae survived for “six months”, or that each soldier used a fixed number of replacement nails in a season, goes beyond the available evidence. The repaired soles and accumulated scraps do show that maintaining footwear consumed both materials and skilled labour.
Hobnail marks and the problem of identifying soldiers
When leather rots away, the iron fasteners may leave the last recognisable outline of a shoe. A cluster of nails can sometimes preserve the shape of a sole, but loose nails found in buildings or on roads could have come from several activities. Archaeologists must consider the findspot: iron grouped in a burial, impressions left in soft material and discarded workshop fastenings do not provide the same kind of evidence. The surrounding context determines how confidently a pattern can be interpreted.
Tiles and other surfaces that were still soft when someone walked across them sometimes preserve footwear impressions. A clear mark can show the edge of a sole and the position of its hobnails, giving evidence of a footstep rather than a shoe found in isolation. Even such traces rarely identify the person’s name, rank or unit. Patterns that resemble signs or insignia are especially easy to overinterpret. Associating a footprint with a particular legion needs independent evidence.
Iron-studded soles also appear among women’s footwear. A Vindolanda curator’s discussion of a woman’s decorated hobnailed shoe describes nails that helped fasten the layers of the sole while forming an attractive pattern. The design combined an everyday function with ornament. Finds of that kind rule out the assumption that any hobnail print on a road or in a fort must have been made by a marching soldier.
Footwear at work inside the fort
A Roman soldier’s working day could involve much more than training or combat. Troops constructed fortifications, repaired roads, moved supplies, stood watch at gates and worked in military workshops. Strong outdoor footwear had obvious uses in such work, but there is no record telling us which shoes every man chose for each duty. Soldiers might also acquire other pairs for activities away from official service.
Civilian life around the fort required different footwear as well. Craftspeople spent time in workshops, family members needed shoes in a range of sizes, and bathhouse users may have wanted a barrier against hot or wet floors. Finds at Vindolanda include wooden-soled clogs associated with the Roman term sculponae. In research discussed by Elizabeth Greene and Maryl Gensheimer, forty-four complete or fragmentary clogs and additional leather uppers are reported. Some may have been used at baths, though other purposes are still being investigated.
A Roman fort supported the lives of workers, traders and families as well as soldiers. The shoes show that its inhabitants did not all wear the same open military style. Caligae remained a recognisable sign of soldiers, but meeting the practical needs of a Roman military community called for far more varied footwear than that familiar image suggests.
Did caligae disappear from the Roman army?
It is difficult to identify a single date when Roman soldiers stopped wearing the classic caliga. The army changed over the centuries, with different arrangements for recruitment, frontiers, units and clothing. Images of soldiers were made for particular audiences; an imperial victory relief cannot be read as a catalogue of campaign equipment. Shoes placed in graves may reflect local customs, and archaeological layers range from securely dated waterlogged contexts to mixed deposits. The evidence points to changes that differed from region to region; no surviving decree ordered every soldier to abandon one kind of shoe.
The first-century openwork caliga did not remain the permanent Roman standard. Archaeological classifications show changes in how footwear was made, and closed designs became more prominent in certain places. It is misleading to turn this into a uniform replacement of sandals by boots in the third or fourth century. One French museum account places the disappearance of the familiar caliga near the beginning of the second century, while other studies suggest it lasted longer in particular regions. The discrepancy partly reflects the different finds and definitions that researchers use.
Van Driel-Murray’s study of footwear chronology at Vindolanda offers a more secure way to follow such developments: compare constructions found in datable archaeological layers. Climate may have mattered, along with military fashion, local workshop practices and changes in supply, but none of those explanations can simply be assumed to have forced a universal shift into enclosed boots. Closed shoes already existed alongside openwork forms in earlier Roman contexts.
The vocabulary is another difficulty. The term caliga continued to be used after the design most often shown in modern reconstructions had changed. An author writing in late antiquity might have meant a different kind of footwear from a first-century soldier’s openwork caliga. Dating the objects, examining depictions and interpreting Latin terminology are related tasks, but the results do not always align.
What a Roman shoe can reveal about the people who wore it
Even the size of a surviving shoe can be difficult to interpret. At Magna, a Roman fort near Vindolanda, excavators recovered several unusually large shoes in 2025, including a sole measuring about 32.6 centimetres. Researchers writing for the University of Reading cautioned that a long shoe does not directly measure the height of its owner. The size of the surviving sample, the shoe’s construction and the way footwear was worn all affect what can be inferred. The finds open questions about garrison populations without providing instant answers.
Applying a modern commercial shoe size to an ancient sole introduces further uncertainty. Roman workshops did not follow today’s sizing conventions, and leather can shrink or distort during burial. An unusually long sole could have left room for foot coverings or reflected the fashion of its period. Smaller shoes, when supported by their construction, proportions and findspots, offer firmer evidence of children in a settlement. Archaeologists can examine the distributions across large groups of finds, but no single oversized shoe is enough to reconstruct the inhabitants’ height or other demographic characteristics.
Vindolanda’s exceptional quantity of surviving footwear makes that broader analysis possible. Researchers can compare sizes, places of disposal, building phases and patterns of wear instead of relying on an isolated spectacular find. The evidence includes the shoes of women and children alongside those associated with soldiers. These discoveries make Roman footwear a source for the social history of military settlements, well beyond the question of how a legionary was dressed.
A caliga was made to help its wearer move, yet its surviving leather and iron also record the people who made, maintained and eventually discarded it. Keeping Roman soldiers shod required leatherworkers, ironworkers, repairs and continuing supplies. No single design can be credited with Rome’s military successes. The surviving shoes document the repeated work needed to keep soldiers and the surrounding communities on their feet.
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