Post Your Papal States Coins - Reverse Chronological Schedule By Ruler

Very nice!

very nice add Spence

very nice Bacc

Hopefully @tdz or one of the other smart folk hanging around this thread can weigh in on whether this next coin of mine is in or out of scope. I have this 1741 Quattrino listed as coming from the Vatican Papal City State of Bologna, but there isn't anything which suggests homage to Clement XII (so maybe it is just an issue of the City of Bologna. Thx for providing your guidance on this!

Lotsa good stuff!



I agree. Also, while I have not read any scholarly analyses on this, there is a lot of empirical evidence (CNI and acsearch results) that the Ferrara mint was extraordinarily active during the 8 years it struck coins during this reign (1744-1751), but maybe all the papal mints followed suit. I will try to come back later with some data. Meanwhile, here is my 1/2 baiocco which is dated with a regnal year (X) but not a calendar year, putting it at 1749-1750. On this one the engraver has curved the shield to the right at the bottom, then added scrolling curved left, whereas Bacchus2's type has a straight shield.

excellent add tdz!

I really like the slightly uneven lines of letters on the reverse of the 1749/1750 1/2 baiocco. Those imperfections bring home the fact that someone personally engraved that die some 275 years ago, and helps tie to the history.

Great coin.

That's a great thought, and I will build on that to share one fact I've uncovered on the numbers of copper coins struck under Benedict XIV.
The Ravenna quattrino we each have is one of six quattrino types struck in Ravenna under Benedict XIV. Here comes the interesting part. The Muntoni catalog numbers for Ravenna quattrino varieties run from #690 to #859. That's 160 die pairs used between 1744-1750 for that denomination at that mint (and Muntoni didn't find them all ... I've seen listings that say "Munt. unlisted"). If I recall correctly, I've seen a figure for die productivity of something like 10,000 (but I also recall copper is harder to stamp than silver, so maybe the die life was fewer). Anyhow that makes a figure like 1 million Ravenna quattrinos probably in the right ballpark.
But Ravenna wasn't even a very big place; Bologna was the biggest city in that part of the Papal States, and Ferrara also quite a bit larger, and both of them were striking low denomination coppers, too, as weve seen from coins posted on the last couple of pages here. So I wonder what the monetary strategy was?

While we are on quattrinos, I also have a version of the Gubbio quattrino with Saint Paul, but from Benedict's reign (it seems his beard grew a bit in the intervening years):