The idea for this blog came from unlikely sources: a boring eighth-grade study hall, a game of chess, and my school library’s 972 section. I had already finished all of my homework (read chapter one of To Kill a Mockingbird and do 11 trigonometry problems) and was bored. So I decided to play a game of chess on my computer. My teacher told me to stop and do something productive. I went to the library and found the 972 section about the Spanish Conquest. I picked up a book about the Inca emperor Atahualpa and started flipping through it. Then something caught my eye. It was a picture of a Lima gold doubloon. I looked over and saw a poster about a trip to Spain centered on colonialism. I knew I hadn’t done a Coins of Great Empires blog in forever (my laptop broke last March and money.org was blocked on school computers last year) so I decided to do one about the coins of the Spanish Empire.