Ferdinand VI never visited the Americas, and his coinage from Potosí reflects the administrative distance between Madrid and the Viceroyalty of Peru. The Potosí mint had a long history of fraud — most notoriously the scandal of 1649, when assayers were found to have debased silver on a massive scale for years — and the Crown's tightened oversight during Ferdinand's reign was partly a consequence of that institutional distrust still reverberating a century later.
This macuquina-style cob issue was among the last of its type; the transition to milled coinage at Potosí was completed by 1773 under Charles III.
Ferdinand VI never visited the Americas, and his coinage from Potosí reflects the administrative distance between Madrid and the Viceroyalty of Peru. The Potosí mint had a long history of fraud — most notoriously the scandal of 1649, when assayers were found to have debased silver on a massive scale for years — and the Crown's tightened oversight during Ferdinand's reign was partly a consequence of that institutional distrust still reverberating a century later.
This macuquina-style cob issue was among the last of its type; the transition to milled coinage at Potosí was completed by 1773 under Charles III.