Grosso of 10 imperials - In the name of Conrad II

Piacenza's grosso issues span nearly two centuries of communal government, a period during which the city oscillated between Guelph and Ghibelline allegiances with enough frequency to make the invocation of Conrad II's name a calculated political gesture rather than genuine imperial loyalty. By the mid-thirteenth century, striking coins in the name of a German emperor dead for over a hundred years was a legal fiction — a way to assert minting rights without provoking either faction decisively.

The 10-imperial denomination places this within Lombardy's complex accounting system, where the imperial was a money of account rather than a struck coin, its value relative to local denari shifting across the period's currency reforms.