Philip IV had inherited a monetary disaster. The copper vellón coinage issued under his father had been so aggressively inflated — with blanks struck underweight and then countermarked upward in face value — that confidence in small denomination copper had essentially collapsed by the early 1620s. The milled 2 Maravedis of 1622 was part of a short-lived attempt to restore credibility through machine-struck precision at Segovia, whose water-powered mill had been operating since the 1580s under technology imported from Germany.
The reform didn't hold. By 1626 the crown was debasing again.
Philip IV had inherited a monetary disaster. The copper vellón coinage issued under his father had been so aggressively inflated — with blanks struck underweight and then countermarked upward in face value — that confidence in small denomination copper had essentially collapsed by the early 1620s. The milled 2 Maravedis of 1622 was part of a short-lived attempt to restore credibility through machine-struck precision at Segovia, whose water-powered mill had been operating since the 1580s under technology imported from Germany.
The reform didn't hold. By 1626 the crown was debasing again.