1 Testone - Clement XI

Clement XI issued this testone during one of the most politically disastrous stretches of his pontificate — the years in which his 1713 bull Unigenitus was still forming, but his temporal authority was already collapsing under pressure from the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1709, Joseph I seized the Papal States' northern territories after Clement briefly recognized Philip V as king of Spain, a diplomatic miscalculation that cost him Comacchio and Parma for years.

The testone denomination itself was already archaic by this point, a holdover from the 16th-century Papal monetary system that Rome stubbornly retained long after other Italian states had rationalized their coinages.