4 Maravedis - Philip V Pattern; Madrid

Philip V spent much of his reign wrestling with Castile's degraded copper coinage — the maravedí had been debased, restamped, and revalued so many times across the seventeenth century that public confidence in small denomination copper was essentially broken by the time he took the throne. The 1739 Madrid pattern fits into a broader reform effort to rationalize copper circulation, though the proposal evidently went nowhere; production pieces conforming to this specification are not recorded.

Pattern issues from the Madrid mint in this period are documented primarily through auction appearances rather than institutional holdings, with Aureo's cataloguing representing some of the most reliable reference points for this otherwise poorly documented type.