Member of the House of Habsburg, Philip III, the son of Philip II and his fourth wife, Anna, came to the throne of Spain when his father died in 1598. He married Marguerite of Austria, by whom he had eight children. As the ruler of the Spanish Empire at its height, he achieved a temporary peace with the Dutch (1609–1621) and brought Spain into the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) through an initially extremely successful campaign. Philip's reign remains a critical period in Spanish history. The real was a unit of currency in Spain and its colonies for several centuries. When additional silver deposits were discovered in the colonial territories there was a pressing demand to export it to Spain as quickly as possible. To do this, starting in the reign of Philip II, the mints produced irregular coinage called cobs. A bar of silver was simply cut into chunks of the appropriate weight. The intention in minting these crude but accurately weighed cobs was to produce an easily portable product that could be sent to Spain. In Spain, the cobs would be melted down to produce silver jewelry, coins, bars and other items. Each coin has a unique shape and is a one-of-a-kind piece of history.
