(1666-99) Cob 8 Escudos (Onza)

The cob eight escudos is the coin the word doubloon actually refers to. Struck from hand-cut dies on a roughly trimmed gold blank, it carried the equivalent of sixteen silver pieces of eight - a single coin representing what a working man might see in a year - and it travelled home to Seville in the strongboxes of the treasure fleets.

The obverse shows the crowned Habsburg arms of Charles II, quartered with the castles and lions of Castile and León and the pomegranate of Granada at the base. The reverse carries the Jerusalem cross in a tressure of arcs - the design that survived on Spanish colonial gold, essentially unchanged, for the better part of two centuries.

Charles II was the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, and his reign is the twilight of the empire that these coins financed. Gold cobs of the period survive in far smaller numbers than their silver counterparts: gold was reclaimed, refined, and restruck whenever monetary reform demanded it, and most of what escaped the melting pot did so on the seabed.

This piece grades PCGS AU-55, with the bold central devices and warm original gold surfaces that separate a genuinely uncirculated-looking onza from the crude, weakly struck examples that dominate the type.