1 Grano - Luis Mendes de Vasconcellos

Luis Mendes de Vasconcellos served as Grand Master of the Order for less than two years, dying in office in 1623 after a tenure too brief to leave much administrative mark. The Order's copper coinage of this period was struck on Malta primarily for local circulation, the Knights maintaining mint rights as a sovereign prerogative jealously guarded even as Ottoman pressure on their eastern Mediterranean position remained unrelenting. Vasconcellos succeeded from within the Portuguese langue, one of the Order's eight national divisions, and his brief magistracy produced a correspondingly thin numismatic record.