Teston - Louis II Juvenile Bust

Louis II of Dombes was just eleven years old when these testons were struck, ruling the small Montpensier appanage principality under the regency of his mother, Louise de Bourbon-Montpensier. The dating spans barely a year — Louis died in 1582 at age eighteen, and his brief tenure produced a thin series of issues across only a handful of denominations. Dombes itself, a lordship perched between the Saône and the Ain, punched well above its political weight in coinage output during the sixteenth century precisely because the Montpensier family guarded their minting rights aggressively against Valois encroachment.