Term
Moidore
Etymology
From Portuguese moeda de ouro, “coin of gold.”
Definition
The Portuguese gold coin of four thousand reis (face value; effectively valued at four thousand eight hundred reis from 1688), in circulation from approximately 1640 until the early nineteenth century. The Bartholomew Roberts Sagrada Família prize-take at Bahia in September 1719 of approximately forty thousand moidores in gold (a sum equivalent to several hundred thousand English pounds of the period) was the single richest documented Golden Age prize.
