Mezzo Ducatone - Francesco I

Francesco I d'Este came to power in 1629 and almost immediately faced the catastrophe of the Mantuan Succession War, during which Imperial troops sacked Mantua in 1630 in one of the worst atrocities of the Thirty Years' War. The plague that followed — the same epidemic Manzoni later dramatized in I Promessi Sposi — devastated the Po Valley through 1631, the very year this piece was struck. That a ducatone emission was organized at all under those conditions is noteworthy.

The MIR 764 attribution places this among the earliest coinage of Francesco's reign, before the Este mint output expanded significantly in the 1640s.