1 Quattrino - Giovanni II Bentivoglio

Giovanni II Bentivoglio ruled Bologna not as a lord in any formal sense — he held no official title — but as a de facto signore operating through puppet gonfalonieri while maintaining the fiction of republican government. This arrangement suited both the Bentivoglio and a papacy too distracted by its own crises to intervene until Julius II finally expelled the family in 1506. The quattrino issued under his name occupies an unusual legal position as a result: struck in the name of a republic by a man who was neither its elected head nor its sovereign.