2 1/2 Euros Numismatic Treasures – Escudo of Saint Thomas

This piece belongs to Portugal's ongoing Numismatic Treasures series, which reproduces historical Portuguese coinage types in gold as collector issues. The escudo of São Tomé — the island colony Portugal administered from the late fifteenth century — represents one of the more obscure branches of the early modern Portuguese monetary system, issued for a territory whose sugar economy briefly made it one of the wealthiest colonial possessions in the Atlantic world before Brazilian production eclipsed it entirely in the seventeenth century.