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1 Ducato `Ongaro` - Agostino Spinola
| Issuer | County of Tassarolo (Italian States) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1604-1616 |
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| Currency | Scudo |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Diameter | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Full-length armored effigy of Count Agostino Spinola standing facing right, clad in plate armor, holding a sword with point directed downward in his left hand. The figure occupies the central field, rendered in the late Renaissance style typical of northern Italian hammered gold coinage. A circular Latin legend surrounds the figure along the periphery of the coin. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | SVB VMBRA ALARVM TVARVM |
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| Additional information |
The Spinola family secured the right to strike gold coinage at Tassarolo — a tiny fief southeast of Genoa — through the same combination of banking wealth and Habsburg patronage that made them dominant figures in the Army of Flanders. Agostino Spinola's ducato ongaro copies the long-running Hungarian ducat type precisely because that denomination carried universal acceptance across European trade networks, making the issuing authority almost irrelevant to merchants using it. A feudal lord minting Hungarian-type gold was not an act of ambition so much as a commercial calculation.
Tassarolo's output across this twelve-year window was modest by any measure, and the MIR cataloguers assigned only a handful of die variants to the entire Agostino series.