Denier Tournois - Philippe IV

Philippe IV inherited a denier tournois coinage already debased well below its mid-century standard, but it was under his own later campaigns of deliberate debasement — driven largely by the crushing financial demands of war with England and Flanders — that billon coinage became something of a political liability. This particular issue, struck in the relatively early years of his reign, predates the worst of those manipulations and holds a marginally more honest fineness than what followed.

The tournois type itself originated at the abbey of Saint-Martin de Tours before the French crown absorbed it wholesale.