Gold Rider - Charles III

Charles III ruled Savoy through one of the duchy's most turbulent stretches — caught between France and the Habsburgs, he lost effective control of most of his territories to Francis I after 1536 and spent the final seventeen years of his reign essentially a duke without a duchy, dying in Vercelli in 1553 with Piedmont still under French occupation. That the gold rider continued to be struck across this entire period speaks more to the persistence of monetary infrastructure in the remaining free territories than to any coherent fiscal policy.

The MIR 328 attribution covers considerable die variation across the nearly five-decade span of production. Collectors working this series should treat Dy féodales 2819 and MB 144 as cross-references rather than independent varieties — they describe the same type from different cataloguing traditions.