Brûlé - Corneille de Berghes

Corneille de Berghes served as Prince-Bishop of Liège from 1538 until his death in 1544, a tenure marked by ongoing friction with the city's guilds and the broader pressures of Reformation-era politics pressing in from every direction. The brûlé — a small copper fractional piece — took its name from the practice of deliberately burning or defacing worn or counterfeit specimens to remove them from circulation, a recurring problem in the copper coinage of the Mosan region throughout the sixteenth century. Dengis 863 is not a common attribution, and surviving pieces in collectible condition are genuinely scarce.