1 Luigino - Louis I

Luigini were struck by dozens of minor European rulers in the mid-seventeenth century not for domestic circulation but explicitly for the Levant trade, where Ottoman merchants accepted them by weight as a substitute for the Ottoman asper. Monaco's issues under Louis I were part of this coordinated small-state arbitrage — the coins were produced cheaply in silver below the weight of the coins they imitated, shipped east, and exchanged at a profitable spread. The scheme became so widespread that the Ottoman government eventually moved to ban them outright in the 1670s, collapsing the market entirely.