1 Scudo - Ferdinando Carlo

Ferdinando Carlo Gonzaga, the last Duke of Mantua, was by most contemporary accounts more interested in theatrical spectacle and personal excess than governance. His reign saw the duchy's finances hollowed out through chronic mismanagement, and the silver coinage of this period reflects a treasury under sustained strain. These scudi were struck during a window when the Gonzaga court still projected the image of solvent sovereignty, though that fiction was already fraying.

The duchy collapsed definitively in 1708 when Habsburg forces took Mantua after Ferdinando Carlo sided with France in the War of Spanish Succession — a catastrophic political miscalculation that ended Gonzaga rule permanently.