4 maravedis - Felipe IV countermark

This piece is not a new coin but a recycled one — part of Spain's desperate mid-17th century effort to manage a copper currency crisis of its own making. Decades of aggressive vellón inflation, driven by royal mints flooding Castile with low-denomination copper to finance war debt, had so thoroughly devalued circulating maravedis that the Crown attempted a forced revaluation by countermarking older, heavier pieces at a reduced nominal value. The 1654–1655 countermark program was itself a reversal of earlier reseallings that had inflated values upward.

The underlying host coin could originate from any number of earlier reigns and mints, making attribution of individual pieces genuinely complex.