Small Grosso

Genoa's adoption of the grosso in the mid-thirteenth century was a direct commercial response to the expanding volume of Levantine trade following the Crusades, where small denari were simply inadequate for large mercantile transactions. The Republic struck these pieces without dating them — a deliberate policy that kept the coinage legally fungible across decades of issue and insulated it from debasement suspicion.

The MIR and MEC references cited here reflect several die groupings distributed across the full production span, suggesting the type was revisited and subtly adjusted at least three times during circulation.