1 Soldo - Sebastião I Cross

Malacca had been a Portuguese possession since Afonso de Albuquerque seized it in 1511, but minting there was never a tidy affair. The calin alloy — a Southeast Asian tin-lead mixture already in use by local rulers before the conquest — was adopted by the Portuguese specifically because the raw material was abundant in the Malay peninsula and the population already accepted it. Striking coins in a European denomination from a local material was a deliberate accommodation to existing trade habits rather than an imposition of metropolitan standards.

Sebastião I was only three years old when he became king in 1557.