Carolus 3rd type with notched shield

Besançon occupied a peculiar constitutional position throughout the sixteenth century — nominally a free imperial city under Habsburg suzerainty, yet geographically deep within the Franche-Comté, a territory Spain and the Empire contested and shared through inheritance. These petty billon issues bearing Charles's name were struck under that ambiguous authority, the city jealously guarding its minting rights against repeated encroachment from the Spanish governors of the Comté.

The notched shield distinguishes this third type from its predecessors within the sequence catalogued by Duplessy. The notch itself is a heraldic conceit — the échancrure cut to accommodate a lance rest — and its presence or absence became the primary typological differentiator across an otherwise tightly clustered group of emissions spanning these five years.