Anno VII = 1698 (NGC slab incorrectly dated 1697) AR 1/2 Piastre (Mezza Piastra)

Antonio Pignatelli was elected Pope on 12 July 1691 after a five-month conclave deadlocked between the French and Imperial factions. He took the name Innocent XII and immediately set about doing something no Pope had genuinely attempted in a century and a half: ending papal nepotism. On 22 June 1692 he issued the bull Romanum decet Pontificem, which forbade any future Pope from granting estates, offices, or revenues to relatives, and capped the income of any cardinal-nephew at a modest fixed sum. It was the first effective legal limit on the practice that had enriched the Borgia, della Rovere, Farnese, Borghese, Barberini, and Pamphilj dynasties for two centuries. Innocent XII appointed no nephews to office, refused to ennoble his own family, and famously declared that "the poor are my nephews."

The half piastre - mezza piastra - of Anno VII (his seventh pontifical year, running from July 1697 to July 1698, hence the present coin's true date of 1698 rather than the 1697 on the NGC label) is one of the great devotional coins of the Roman baroque. The obverse departs entirely from the standard papal portrait convention. Instead of showing Innocent in profile in tiara and cope, the engraver depicts him from behind and in three-quarter view, kneeling in prayer at a draped prie-dieu column. The papal tiara - the symbol of his temporal sovereignty over the Papal States and his spiritual sovereignty as Vicar of Christ - is deliberately set on the ground beside him, an act of personal humility unimaginable on the coinage of his nepotistic predecessors. From the upper left, the radiant dove of the Holy Spirit descends in glory through the clouds. The legend FIAT PAX IN VIRTVTE TVA - "Let there be peace in Thy strength" (Psalm 122:7, Vulgate) - frames the scene. The whole composition is a visual statement of the doctrine of divine election: the Pope is not the source of his own authority, he is the chosen instrument of God's will on Earth, and he kneels to acknowledge it.

The reverse carries the standard Pignatelli arms - three urns beneath the crossed keys of Saint Peter and the papal tiara, supported by an elaborate baroque cartouche with a cherub's head - and the legend INNOCEN · XII · PONT · M · AN · VII naming the Pope and his seventh year.

The mezza piastra of this kneeling-Pope type was struck only in two years - Anno VI (1696/97) and Anno VII (1697/98) - making it a notoriously short, two-year type that is the focal point of any serious Innocent XII collection. Innocent XII himself died on 27 September 1700 at the age of 85, two months before the close of the Holy Year of 1700 he had personally proclaimed.