X Réis - Pedro Prince Regent

Pedro governed Portugal as regent from 1668 under his incapacitated brother Afonso VI, whom he had effectively deposed and confined — first to the Azores, then to Sintra — in a palace coup engineered partly through Afonso's own wife. This copper issue dates to that regency period, before Pedro formally assumed the crown as Pedro II in 1683 upon Afonso's death. The timing matters: coins struck under the "Prince Regent" title span a narrow constitutional fiction that lasted fifteen years, making the precise dating of individual issues within that window a persistent problem for catalogers.