Grosso - Philip Maria Visconti Shield

This grosso was struck under Genoese submission to Milanese authority — Philip Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, held dominion over Genoa from 1421 to 1435 following the city's voluntary surrender, a pragmatic capitulation driven by the republic's exhaustion from factional warfare between the Fregoso and Adorno families. The shield on the reverse is his, not Genoa's, a quiet but unambiguous declaration of who actually governed the mint.

MEC XII#317 places this squarely within the transitional Genoese series before the city reasserted independence under Tommaso Fregoso in 1435.