1/2 Portugalöser

The Portugalöser was Hamburg's deliberate imitation of the Portuguese 10-cruzado gold piece, adopted by several northern German commercial cities in the sixteenth century as a high-value trade and presentation coin. The half denomination, struck in the years spanning 1578 to 1582, falls within a period when Hamburg's position as the dominant entrepôt for Iberian trade goods — particularly spice and sugar routed through Antwerp's collapse — made Portuguese monetary conventions commercially legible to the city's merchant class.

Surviving examples in any condition are genuinely rare. The Gaedechens corpus lists only a handful of die-documented specimens across all collections.