1/2 Frederick d'Or - Frederick William IV

The Frederick d'Or — and its half denomination — takes its name from Frederick the Great, who introduced the coin type in 1741 as Prussia's primary gold trade piece. Frederick William IV inherited both the throne and the denomination in 1840, but his reign launched under inauspicious signs: the 1848 revolutions forced him to briefly acquiesce to a constitutional assembly before dissolving it and rejecting the Frankfurt Parliament's offer of a unified German crown the following year, famously refusing to accept a crown "from the gutter."

Issues from 1848 and 1849 are notably scarcer, with mint output disrupted by the political upheaval concentrated in those years.