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As the 14th century gave way to the 15th

France struggled through the turmoil of the Hundred Years’ War and internal political chaos,

a single silver piece silently bore witness to a kingdom’s anguish and endurance—the écu minted under Charles VI.

The monarch later remembered as Charles the Mad

ascended to power as a boy and governed through France’s most fractured epoch.

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

Amid relentless internal conflict and relentless English offensives,

the royal mint continued to produce 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, clutching both the royal scepter and the sacred fleur de lys,

signs of sacred kingship and legitimate rule.

The reverse side displayed a radiant cross, each arm tipped with fleurs de lys, encircled by the Latin legend: "Carolus Dei gratia Francorum rex".

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

With the war’s relentless toll, the coin’s purchasing power grew erratic,

inflation, debasement of the coinage, アンティーク コイン 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.

At the moment of Charles VI’s death in 1422, France was no longer a unified realm.

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.

its image of the French king still familiar to the people who had lived under his rule.

Today, surviving examples of the écu of Charles VI are rare and prized by collectors.

Yet their true significance lies beyond coinage—they are relics of a society clinging to ritual and image amid collapse.

The coin tells a story not of triumph, but of persistence.

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