1 Fiorino - Ferdinando I

Castiglione delle Stiviere was a tiny Gonzaga appanage — granted to the lateral Gonzaga-Castiglione line in 1593 — whose right to strike coinage was perpetually contested by neighboring powers and the Habsburgs who nominally oversaw northern Italian fiefs. Ferdinando I ruled the lordship from 1616 until his death in 1678, an unusually long tenure that accounts for the variety of types struck under his name. The fiorino denomination itself was a deliberate archaism by the mid-seventeenth century, invoking Florentine commercial prestige at a moment when the little lordship had almost no meaningful trade economy to speak of.