1 Osella - Alvise Mocenigo II

The osella was Venice's answer to a gift-giving tradition that had outgrown live wildfowl. Doges had long presented wild ducks to the Great Council each January; by the sixteenth century the Senate had formalized a struck silver coin in their place, with the reigning doge commissioning a new reverse design annually. Gold strikes like this one were reserved for diplomatic presentation — not circulation — making survival rates entirely dependent on how carefully foreign recipients treated what they understood to be a ceremonial object rather than money.

Alvise Mocenigo II held the dogeship from 1700 until his death in 1709, a tenure defined largely by Venice's increasingly precarious neutrality during the War of the Spanish Succession.