Carolus au lion

The carolus au lion was a small billon piece issued under the Spanish Habsburg administration of the Free County of Burgundy — the Franche-Comté — during a period when the county's monetary affairs were managed largely from Brussels. The denomination takes its name from Charles V, under whose monetary reforms the carolus class of coins was first established nearly a century earlier, though by the 1620s the type had drifted considerably from its origins in both weight and fineness.

Franche-Comté would pass definitively to France under the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, making issues from this earlier Habsburg phase relatively terminal in the regional coinage sequence.