Gold Ecu - Jean Ferrier

Jean de Ferrier served as Archbishop of Arles from 1499 until his death in 1521, a period during which French royal authority was steadily encroaching on the monetary prerogatives of ecclesiastical lordships. The archbishops of Arles held the right to strike gold coinage — a privilege increasingly contested and curtailed by the crown throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, making this issue one of the last meaningful exercises of that seigneurial right in the region.

Drujon de Beaulieu's documentation of Provençal féodales places this type among the rarest ecclesiastical gold issues of the Midi.