The Silent Witness: Charles VI’s Écu Amid France’s Collapse > 자유게시판

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In the late 14th and early 15th centuries

France endured the relentless strain of the Hundred Years’ War and fracturing court factions,

the écu of Charles VI emerged as an unspoken testament to national endurance amid collapse.

The monarch later remembered as Charles the Mad

became king in infancy and presided over an era defined by chaos and crisis.

His reign was marked by bouts of severe mental illness that left the kingdom vulnerable to factional struggles between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs.

Yet even amid civil strife and English invasions,

authorities kept turning out the écu,

a coin that had been in use since the reign of Louis IX.

This silver coin featured the king, regal and upright, sheltered by a canopy, アンティーク コイン clutching both the royal scepter and the sacred fleur de lys,

signs of sacred kingship and legitimate rule.

On the reverse, a cross adorned with fleurs de lys radiated outward, encircled by the Latin inscription meaning Charles by the grace of God, king of the French.

The design was elegant, deliberate, and meant to project stability—even when the realm was anything but.

As the war dragged on, the value of the écu fluctuated,

inflation, debasement of the coinage, and the loss of territory to the English meant that the silver content of the coin was sometimes reduced.

The portrait of Charles VI persisted, a steadfast symbol in a landscape of betrayal and fractured oaths.

Merchants, peasants, and soldiers alike handled these coins,

each one carrying the weight of a king’s madness and a nation’s endurance.

When Charles VI passed away in 1422, the kingdom lay in shards.

Through the Treaty of Troyes, France’s throne was legally transferred from Charles VI’s son to the English monarch Henry V.

As Henry V assumed the French crown, the people still trusted and traded with Charles VI’s coin.

the king’s face, though no longer ruling, remained deeply familiar to the populace.

Modern numismatists treasure the few remaining écus of Charles VI as rare and invaluable artifacts.

More than currency, they embody a people’s desperate grasp at dignity and structure while their world disintegrated.

This is not a tale of victory, but of quiet endurance.

the unspoken resolve of a populace who continued to accept the écu, even as their sovereign ceased to govern