Grosso - Giovanni Maria Varano

Giovanni Maria Varano ruled Camerino under increasingly precarious conditions — the lordship changed hands repeatedly under pressure from Cesare Borgia in the early sixteenth century, and Giovanni Maria's own tenure was cut short when he was strangled on the orders of his cousin Giulio Cesare Varano in 1527, the same year Camerino passed out of Varano hands entirely. This grosso belongs to a civic coinage issued during that final unstable decade of the dynasty's rule.