Obol - James II Barcelona mint

James II ruled Catalonia and Aragon simultaneously after 1291, but his monetary administration treated the two territories as distinct — Catalan coinage was issued under the authority of the Principality, not the Crown of Aragon, a jurisdictional distinction that Catalan municipalities had extracted through hard negotiation over the preceding century. The Barcelona mint operated under close oversight from the city's consular government, which retained rights to inspect dies and weigh production runs.

At roughly half a gram, these obols circulated as the smallest practical unit of the Barcelona billon system, handling the lowest-value daily transactions in a port city that was simultaneously one of the Mediterranean's busiest commercial centers in the early fourteenth century.