1 Scudo - Giovanni Bembo

Giovanni Bembo served as Doge for barely two years before his death in March 1618, making his coinage among the shorter-lived issues of the late Republic. The scudo da 140 soldi — this denomination — had only been introduced a generation earlier as Venice struggled to compete with the large silver thalers flooding European trade routes from the Habsburg mines at Joachimstal and, later, Potosí. Venice needed a coin that could hold its own in Levantine commerce, where merchants weighed pieces rather than counted them.

The high fineness, .948, was not accidental — it was a deliberate policy of the Zecca to maintain a silver standard that Mediterranean trading partners trusted absolutely.