1/2 Ducatone - Carlo I

Carlo I ruled Mantua through one of the most catastrophic episodes in the duchy's history. The War of the Mantuan Succession, triggered by the extinction of the Gonzaga-Nevers line in 1627, drew in Spanish, French, and Imperial forces simultaneously. In 1630, Imperial troops sacked Mantua with a thoroughness that shocked even hardened contemporaries — the city lost an estimated two-thirds of its population to violence and plague within months. That this coinage was produced at all across the full decade of Carlo's reign speaks to the administrative stubbornness of a court operating under near-constant military occupation.

The MIR 647 attribution covers multiple die marriages across the period, and the overlap with both KM numbers reflects genuine scholarly disagreement about which physical specimens belong to which emission phase.