1/2 Tostão - Sebastião I 3rd type

Sebastião I's third-type half tostão falls within the years of his increasingly reckless Moroccan ambitions, a campaign that would end at Alcácer Quibir in 1578 with the king dead, no heir, and the Portuguese crown available for Philip II of Spain to absorb two years later. The minting of this type thus brackets the last coherent years of independent Portuguese monetary administration before sixty years of Iberian Union.

Gomes 36 is the standard reference, with no particularly notorious die varieties recorded for this emission.