1/2 Groschen - Gregory XIII Charles de Bourbon legate, Georges d`Armagnac co-legate

The Comtat Venaissin was a papal enclave entirely surrounded by French territory — not part of France, but governed from Rome through a series of appointed legates. Charles de Bourbon served as legate while simultaneously holding the archbishopric of Rouen, an arrangement that placed enormous secular and ecclesiastical power in a single French cardinal's hands during some of the most violent decades of the Wars of Religion. Georges d'Armagnac, his co-legate, died in 1585, which effectively brackets the issue's terminus.

Billon coinage from Avignon and the Comtat ran on a separate monetary track from the French royal system throughout this period.