Philip IV — the Counterfeiter King
Philip IV of France, facing massive debts from his wars and the suppression of the Knights Templar, debased the French livre tournois repeatedly between 1303 and 1314. The silver content was cut by as much as two-thirds in some years, then partially restored, then cut again. Contemporary chroniclers called him 'le Roy Faux-Monnayeur' — the Counterfeiter King. His debasements were so chaotic that they contributed directly to the 1305 riots in Paris and to the collapse of French royal credit for most of the next century.
Philip's debasement is sometimes cited as the pretext for his arrest and execution of the Knights Templar in 1307 — he owed them enormous sums in gold, and destroying the order cancelled the debt. The financial engineering and the monetary debasement were two halves of the same fiscal crisis.
02 · Royal Debasement
With the fall of Rome and the fragmentation of Europe into feudal kingdoms, each monarch controlled their own mint. The temptation to debase was structural: a king who recalled all the silver coins in circulation, melted them, and re-struck them with less silver per coin kept the difference as seigniorage. Across 500 years, nearly every European kingdom did this at least once. The most spectacular was Henry VIII's Great Debasement of 1544 to 1551, which cut the silver content of the English shilling from 92.5 percent to 25 percent in seven years.
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