8 Maravedis - Felipe IV, Seville

Felipe IV's vellon coinage of the early 1660s was the tail end of a catastrophic monetary experiment. The Spanish crown had debased, countermarked, and revalued its copper and billon currency so many times across the preceding decades that public confidence had essentially collapsed — merchants in Castile routinely refused to accept vellon at face value, and silver commanded an enormous premium. The 1661 pragmatic finally attempted to stabilize matters by reducing the official valuation of circulating vellon by half, an effective overnight confiscation of purchasing power from anyone holding the coins.

Seville's output during this window is notoriously inconsistent in flan quality, a direct consequence of the mint recycling previously countermarked pieces as raw material.