1 Thaler - Francesco Fieschi

Masserano was a tiny Imperial fiefdom in Piedmont, and the Fieschi family's minting activity there was frankly anomalous — a minor lordship producing large-denomination silver on a scale that drew repeated scrutiny from both Savoy and Spanish Milan. Francesco Fieschi held the title Count of Masserano, and the brief window of this issue corresponds to a period of aggressive assertion of comital minting rights that the family had held, somewhat contentiously, since the mid-sixteenth century.

The Fieschi were a Genoese dynasty of considerable reach, and the same clan had earlier produced the conspirator Gian Luigi Fieschi, whose 1547 plot against Andrea Doria ended in his drowning in harbor armor.