1 Grosso - In the name of Frederick I

Brescia's communal coinage emerged from a hard-won grant of minting rights, but the fiction of imperial authority was politically necessary — striking in Frederick Barbarossa's name gave the city's coins legitimacy without surrendering the autonomy the commune had fought for during decades of conflict between northern Italian cities and the Empire. The Lombard League's victory at Legnano in 1176 created exactly this kind of awkward compromise: de facto self-governance dressed in imperial nomenclature.

The date range spans the reigns of three emperors, yet the type persisted unchanged — a detail that underscores how little actual imperial oversight existed over Lombard civic minting by the mid-thirteenth century.