DEBASED SPANISH SILVER: THE "STAR OF LIMA"

 

By the middle of the 16th century, Spanish dreams of finding the mythical city of El Dorado were beginning to fade. The colonizers soon found a suitable alternative with Cerro Rico. Located deep within the Andes range, the unassuming peak, dubbed Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain), provided the Spanish with unimaginable quantities of silver, all extracted by indigenous slaves. While this silver was initially transported to Lima for coinage, the long and perilous route to the Viceregal capital proved untenable. Thus, the town of Potosi, placed at the very base of Cerro Rico, was born. By the time Philip III ascended to the Spanish throne in 1598, the Potosi mint's vast output was almost single-handedly supplying the global economy with silver and making Spain's empire fabulously rich in the process. So unparalleled was its production that the Crown shut down the Lima mint indefinitely as it could not keep up.

It did not take long for this trajectory to shatter. In the early 17th century, traders began to cast doubts on the fineness and weight of Potosi coinage. Once foreign governments stopped accepting silver Reales from Potosi at their nominal value, Spain was forced into action. In 1648, Philip IV sent the inquisitor Francisco de Nestares Marin to investigate. Within a year, Nestares Marin uncovered a vast web of corruption, with parties at all levels guilty of producing deliberately debased coinage and pocketing the difference. Over 100 implicated individuals received punishment, and several of the guiltiest were executed by strangulation, including the assayers Jeronimo Velasquez and Juan Rodriguez de la Rocha. Faulty coins were melted down and a new assayer took office, but these reforms were insufficient to restore global faith in Spanish silver. Furthermore, hoarding of the new specie created a disastrous shortage of circulating coinage. This crisis escalated to the point where the Viceroy of Peru, without the permission of the Crown, unilaterally reopened the Lima mint and produced the unique Star of Lima issues before the Spanish authorities shut down this illegal action just a year later.

Things finally settled down in 1652 when, after a series of short-lived prototype issues, a new coin design was settled upon that included the date and assayer's name in at least three places. This bold new design ensured that the origins of faulty coins could be traced even in extremely crude examples. Sacrificing beauty for security, this type was in continuous production at Potosi until Cob coinage finally ceased more than a century later.

Our November 2022 Collectors Choice Online auction will feature Pat Johnson's vast collection of Latin American issues, including a nearly complete date run of Cobs from Potosi and Lima. Among them are rare issues of the later-executed assayers Velasquez and de la Rocha, seldom-seen transitional and countermarked types from 1652, and a coveted one-year Star of Lima issue. Each stage of this pivotal period, from the initial fraud and the transitional types to the unauthorized Lima issues and final redesign, is offered through spectacular examples from the Pat Johnson Collection. Each coin in this extraordinary offering tells the story of Spain's insatiable greed and the gradual development of the Latin American identity that it inadvertently initiated.

To read the complete article, see:
A SCANDAL THAT SHOOK THE WORLD (https://stacksbowers.com/a-scandal-that-shook-the-world/)

This is a case of it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission. The city of Lima, Peru, was short of silver coinage and needed to remedy the situation before the king could be asked. For 67 years the Lima mint remained closed while coins were struck at a furious rate in Potosí, the source of the silver. To avoid heavy taxation, wealthy mine owners were shipping their coins and even whole ingots back to Spain, sometimes even using contraband eastward routes to Buenos Aires. The situation was no doubt exacerbated by the Potosí debasement scandal and subsequent recall of coinage in 1649-1652. When the Lima town council suggested re-opening the Lima mint in 1658, the Viceroy, Count Alba de Liste, considered it within his authority to allow it, without Philip IV's permission up front. Forgiveness eventually came, but permission did not.

Documents show that the Lima mint began striking this unauthorized coinage in January 1659 and ceased in April 1660. One of the great mysteries of Spanish colonial numismatics is why the mintage continued for so long when the king clearly did not approve. One theory is that the first samples for the king were lost on a shipwreck, for the remains of the San Miguel el Arcángel, sunk in 1659 off Jupiter, Florida, have yielded many round and well-struck presentation examples. In fact this wreck has become the primary source for Star of Lima coins, but only for the year 1659. As we shall see, the coins that are not from the wreck, presumably struck later, had slightly different designs.

The design is where the moniker for this series of unauthorized coinage becomes obvious, for the central element on the obverse of each coin is a large star, which symbolized Lima from its founding as Ciudad de los Reyes (City of the Kings). In much smaller form the star was used on Lima's previous coinage under assayer Diego de la Torre, from 1577 to 1588 (with one more year of recorded production in 1592), placed interchangeably with the P mintmark, the oD assayer-mark and the denomination around the central obverse element (shield or monogram). The new version of Lima's star used in 1659 and 1660 was large and prominent.

To read the complete article, see:
An Introduction to the Star of Lima Coinage of 1659-1660 (https://www.sedwickcoins.com/articles/Star_of_lima.pdf)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web