Ecu with 8 Ls - Louis XIV 2nd type

The "8 L" écus were emergency coinage in everything but name. Louis XIV's wars — the War of the Spanish Succession chief among them — had bled the royal treasury to the point where the mint was ordered to recoin enormous quantities of older silver on reforming edicts of 1704 and 1709, extracting seigniorage profit with each pass through the dies. The design itself was a fiscal instrument: eight interlaced Ls packed onto a single flan represented not dynastic vanity but an accounting exercise, generating revenue from the recoinage mandate itself.

Surviving pieces frequently show adjustment marks from the original blanks, a consequence of the rushed recoinage program rather than careless striking.