11/4 Meticais - Maria II

The fractional gold meticais issued for Mozambique in 1835 occupy an odd corner of Portuguese colonial monetary history. Lisbon was simultaneously managing a civil war — the Liberal Wars had formally concluded only the year before, with Maria II's absolutist uncle Miguel forced into exile in 1834 — yet the colonial treasury still required functional specie for Indian Ocean trade networks where gold by weight carried real commercial weight.

The metical itself was a unit borrowed from the Arabic mithqal, embedded in East African coastal commerce long before Portuguese administration formalized it into struck coinage.