The bastardo was one of several fractional denominations struck by the Portuguese at Malacca after Afonso de Albuquerque seized the port in 1511, integrating the mint into a colonial monetary system designed to displace the local tin coinage that had circulated there for generations. Calin — a local tin-lead alloy — was the only practical choice; it was what the Malay economy ran on, and Portuguese administrators understood that forcing a foreign metal on the spice trade's central entrepôt would have been commercially ruinous.
The name bastardo itself signals ambiguity: neither a clean fraction nor a round value, it occupied an awkward middle position in the Portuguese colonial tariff schedule.
The bastardo was one of several fractional denominations struck by the Portuguese at Malacca after Afonso de Albuquerque seized the port in 1511, integrating the mint into a colonial monetary system designed to displace the local tin coinage that had circulated there for generations. Calin — a local tin-lead alloy — was the only practical choice; it was what the Malay economy ran on, and Portuguese administrators understood that forcing a foreign metal on the spice trade's central entrepôt would have been commercially ruinous.
The name bastardo itself signals ambiguity: neither a clean fraction nor a round value, it occupied an awkward middle position in the Portuguese colonial tariff schedule.