1/8 Genovino 'Ottavino'

The genovino, introduced around 1252, was among the earliest gold coins struck in medieval Western Europe — part of the same wave that produced Florence's florin. This eighth-fraction, the ottavino, circulated in Liguria's dense commercial networks at a moment when Genoa was aggressively expanding its Black Sea trading colonies, particularly after the Treaty of Nymphaeum granted Genoese merchants sweeping privileges throughout Byzantine-controlled waters. Small fractional gold was essential for that trade, bridging transactions too fine for silver but too modest for a full genovino.

The MEC XII attribution places this piece firmly within the anonymous communal coinage of the late Duecento, before the podestà-era reforms tightened mint administration in the early fourteenth century.