1 grosso au nom d'Otton

Lucca's grosso coinage is unusual in that it continued to invoke the name of Otto IV — Holy Roman Emperor — long after his death in 1218, and indeed long after his excommunication by Innocent III had made him a deeply inconvenient figure to commemorate. The city used the imperial name as a monetary fiction, a guarantee of weight and fineness divorced entirely from any living ruler's authority. It was monetary conservatism bordering on the stubborn.

CNI XI places this among the earliest of the Lucchese grossi, a series that would persist in this frozen nominal form for decades.