Écu

Écu (from Latin scutum) means shield, and the coin was so called because its design included the coat of arms of France.

Venice and Florence had already shown that there was demand for larger silver and gold coins and in 1266 Louis IX sought an advantage for the royal coinage by expanding it in these areas.

[3] His gold écu d'or showed a shield strewn with fleur-de-lis, which was the coat of arms of the kings of France at the time.

These coins were valued as if gold was worth only 10 times as much as silver, an unrealistic ratio which Edward III of England had unsuccessfully tried to use.

[4] Philip IV reintroduced gold coinage to France in 1296 and began a sequence of extravagantly designed but rapidly changing types.

[5] Charles VI ended the practice of frequently changing gold coin designs (but not that of tampering with their weight and value) with his écu à la couronne in 1385.

The government of the child Charles VI abandoned his father's sound money policy by replacing his gold franc à cheval.

[8] In the second half of the 1500s gold and silver imported from Spanish America impacted the French economy, but the king of France was not getting much of the new wealth.

This exacerbated the inflation caused by the increase in the supply of gold and silver, and the Estates General, which met at Blois in 1576, added to the public pressure to stop currency manipulation.

The types of quarter and eighth écus d'argent paralleled those of the écu d’or, with the royal arms on the obverse and a cross on the reverse.

[9] Royal coins struck at mints in Navarre and Béarn added local heraldry to the fleur-de-lis of France.

The écu, as it existed immediately before the French Revolution, was approximately equivalent (in terms of purchasing power) to 24 euro or 30 U.S. dollars in 2017.

[citation needed] The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin Classics - by Alexandre Dumas -translated by Robin Buss) “The speculators were the richer by eight hundred thousand écus.” (Page 179)