As Alloverover says, it is a four Maravedis piece – but despite appearances, it is not from Santo Domingo. There’s quite a story behind this.
When Columbus set sail in 1492, his instructions included authorization to establish a royal mint on any land that he found, not in anticipation of the natives having an urgent need for currency, but rather as this being a more impressive political statement of sovereignty than merely planting a flag.
After making landfall in the Bahamas, Columbus sailed around the Caribbean and set up a base on the island of Hispaniola, (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and left 39 men there. On his second voyage in 1494, he was given renewed instructions to set up a mint, and again in 1497, when San Domingo was certainly the first named colonial mint to be authorised by the Spanish crown. Work on the mint however did not start until around 1535 and production did not begin until March 1542 – by which time the Mexico City mint had been in production for six years.
The basic reason for the delay in Santo Domingo was that while Columbus brought back from his first two journeys some gold and pearls, exotic spices, some parrots and a few captured natives, the lack of any really worthwhile Caribbean deposits of gold, silver or even copper, made the order to establish a mint almost redundant. It has even been suggested that the first coins ever produced there – a good few years later - came from silver bullion sent out from Spain.
There are however coins with the Santo Domingo mintmark, SD – but these were silver 1-real coins produced in Seville in 1506, as were 2 million worth of maravedis in 1511, in 4-maravedi coins. In 1531, a merchant from Burgos in northern Spain was authorised to ship the same amount of maravedis with the SD mintmark from the Burgos mint to Santo Domingo in 2 and 4 maravedis coins. The domestic production in Santo Domingo was small and so the mint was finally closed after 36 years in 1578.
4 Maravedis Sevilla Carlos V.jpg
4 Maravedis Burgos for Santo Domingo.jpg
4 Maravedis Burgos for Santo Domingo reverse.jpg
Why produce SD coins in Seville and Burgos? The answer is power politics between Spain and Portugal. Before Columbus, Portugal, as an Atlantic nation, was the leading country in overseas exploration, and its navigators were seeking a route to India and China by sailing down the African coast and rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. Columbus, for example, in the service of the Portuguese king had sailed as far south as Ghana – then known as the Gold Coast.
Spain, on the other hand, considered itself primarily as a Mediterranean and European nation, with vast territories in Italy, (Sicily, Naples, Milan), the Spanish Netherlands etc. After war with Portugal between 1475 and 1479, Spain agreed to leave the Atlantic to Portugal. But then in 1492 came an experienced navigator with what seemed to be a highly profitable proposal of a shorter route to India (by Columbus’s erroneous calculations) by sailing west. The king of Portugal had turned down Columbus’s proposal several times over the years as Portugal thought the African route was shorter, and perhaps because Columbus had taken to living openly with his mistress.
On his return in 1493 from his first trip, Columbus, unwisely perhaps, made Lisbon his first port of call – perhaps to gloat and show King Manuel that he had backed the wrong horse? The Portuguese were livid, but a treaty was agreed in 1494 to divide the world into two spheres of influence, the Portuguese and the Spanish. The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed, with the Spanish possessions west of the dividing line which just skirted the Caribbean. The treaty had to be ratified by the Pope, who did so in 1506 – funnily enough, the very same year that the Spanish could show the Pope silver reales which had just been produced in the brand new mint of Santo Domingo, in one of their new possessions. A political master stroke which made sure that the Pope could not tweak the line a little more to the west in favour of Portugal – there was a flourishing colony in Santo Domingo already, with its own mint – and thus guaranteed Spain’s “rights” in the New World. Moreover, what looks like a capital V is in fact a monogram with an F on the left and an I on the right, for Fernando and Isabel. How could the Pope ever find out that he had been fooled?
Main source for info on the mints: Ensayadores – Las Emisiones Monetarias Hispanicas (Siglos XV-XX), Josep Pellicer i Bru, published Barcelona 2010. (Moneyers – Hispanic Monetary Issues (XV-XX Century)
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
, signals were banging out yesterday and were everywhere which makes a change to how the field has been of late ( it has been hammered for years), it has been rolled really tightly this year and I put the amount of signals down to this compaction, was a really enjoyable session due to that and the billiard table flatness, happy days 
