2 Escudos - Felipe IV

Felipe IV's cob coinage — the macuquinas struck at mints across Spanish America and Iberia during this period — was produced by a system so loosely supervised that fraud became endemic. The 1640s saw a major scandal at the Potosí mint, where assayers had been systematically debasing silver coinage for years before the crown's inspectors caught it. Gold escudos from the same era drew scrutiny by association, though the gold assay process was generally harder to manipulate than silver.

The Hernández references spanning 700–703 indicate multiple mint and assayer combinations, each representing a distinct administrative moment in a reign that lasted 44 years across catastrophic wars, colonial upheaval, and serial bankruptcies.