1/2 Baiocco - Pius VI Narrow shield

By 1797, Pius VI was watching his temporal authority disintegrate in real time. Napoleon's army had seized the Legations — Bologna, Ferrara, the Romagna — under the Treaty of Tolentino signed that February, and the Papal States were effectively stripped of their northern territories and forced to pay an indemnity of 30 million livres. Coinage continued almost by institutional inertia, the mint at Rome still producing small copper while the political ground collapsed beneath it.

Pius himself would be taken prisoner by French forces the following year, dying in Valence in 1799 — the last pope to govern from a position of meaningful secular power before the Napoleonic reorganization made that fiction permanent.