1 Scudo d'Oro - Paul IV

Giovanni Pietro Carafa was already 79 years old when elected Paul IV in 1555, and his pontificate proved as combative as his temperament. He pursued an aggressively anti-Spanish policy that led to open war with Philip II in 1556–57, a disastrous miscalculation that ended in humiliating papal defeat. The Bologna mint continued striking under his authority throughout this period, though the city itself remained a restive subject of the Papal States, always closer in spirit to its Emilian neighbors than to Rome.

Paul IV is also remembered as the architect of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum's first formal codification and the man who walled Rome's Jewish population into the original ghetto in 1555.