500 Réis - Manuel II Marquez de Pombal

This 500 Réis was struck in the final months of the Portuguese monarchy. Manuel II had ascended the throne in February 1908 following the assassination of his father Carlos I and elder brother Luís Filipe in Lisbon's Terreiro do Paço — a regicide that left an eighteen-year-old on a badly destabilized throne. The republic came on October 5, 1910, and Manuel fled to Gibraltar and then England, never to return. Coins bearing his portrait had an exceptionally short window of legitimate circulation.

The Pombal commemorative series was issued that same year, honoring the 18th-century statesman who rebuilt Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake. Striking a reformist minister on royal coinage, just as the republic was forming, carried an unintended irony.