5 Baiocchi - Gregorio XVI

Gregorio XVI's pontificate was defined by fierce resistance to political modernization — he condemned railways, gas lighting, and liberal constitutions with equal suspicion, famously referring to railroads as "chemins d'enfer" (roads to hell, a pun on "chemins de fer"). The Papal States' coinage system during his reign remained deliberately archaic, retaining the baiocchi denominations that reformers across Europe were abandoning. This small silver piece circulated through a polity increasingly out of step with its neighbors, and within two decades of the last strike, the entire temporal authority of the papacy would be in terminal collapse.