1/4 Ecu - Louis XIII Count of Catalonia

Louis XIII was declared Count of Barcelona — not merely of Catalonia broadly — in January 1641, after the Catalan Revolt drove the principality to renounce Philip IV of Spain and seek French protection. This coin is a direct product of that political rupture. The French crown struck coinage for Catalonia as a concrete assertion of sovereignty over a territory it would hold, tenuously, until the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 returned most of it to Spain.

The series is short-lived by definition, making surviving pieces genuinely scarce rather than artificially so.