4 Escudos - Carlos III

Carlos III's Mexican gold coinage of this period was struck under the "macuquina" or cob method — hand-hammered on irregular flans cut from cast bars — even as milled coinage had already become standard for silver. The mint's reluctance to retool the gold presses meant these escudos retained a medieval production method well into the Bourbon reform era, a bureaucratic inertia that Carlos III himself found embarrassing enough to mandate full mechanization by 1771, the terminal year of this type.

Cob gold from Mexico City is notoriously variable in centering and flan completeness. A fully struck, well-centered example is genuinely rare rather than merely desirable by convention.