1 Grosso Mint Mark

Ragusa — modern Dubrovnik — maintained its mint continuously from the mid-fourteenth century through the early seventeenth, a remarkable run for a city-state that never exceeded a few square miles of territory. The grosso was the backbone of Ragusan commerce, accepted across the Adriatic and deep into the Balkans, where Ragusan merchants dominated the silver trade routes running out of Serbian and Bosnian mines. The republic's diplomatic agility — paying tribute simultaneously to both the Ottoman Sultan and the Hungarian-Croatian crown — kept the mint open when nearly every rival Adriatic trading city had lost its monetary independence.