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5 Doppie - Conrad II
| Issuer | Republic of Genoa |
|---|---|
| Year | 1600-1633 |
| Type | Standard circulation coin |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Central device depicting the stylized castle of Genoa (the Castello), rendered as a tall turreted structure with three towers, flanked on either side by a six-pointed star in the field. The date 1600 appears in the exergue beneath the castle. The entire central design is enclosed within a beaded inner circle. The surrounding legend reads DVX·ET·GVB·REIP·GEN·, identifying the Doge and Governors of the Genoese Republic, with the word GEN partially visible at upper left. The overall style is characteristic of late Renaissance Genoese hammered gold coinage. |
|---|---|
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| Obverse lettering | DVX·ET·GVB·REIP·GEN· 1600 |
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| Additional information |
The 5 Doppie was Genoa's largest gold denomination of the period, struck at a moment when the republic's banking families — the Grimaldi, Doria, and Spinola among them — were financing the Spanish Crown's wars across Europe. Genoese merchant bankers effectively acted as the Habsburgs' private treasury throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and coins of this weight and fineness circulated less as everyday money than as instruments of high-level financial settlement.
The "Conrad II" attribution reflects Genoa's peculiar constitutional fiction of placing a long-dead Holy Roman Emperor as nominal sovereign on its coinage — a tradition maintained for centuries to sidestep questions of civic authority.