1/4 Daalder '1/4 Madonnadaalder' - Hendrik van Brederode

Hendrik van Brederode used his lordship of Vianen — a small but technically sovereign territory between Utrecht and Holland — as a private mint to strike coinage that deliberately undercut official Habsburg issues circulating in the nearby provinces. The so-called Madonnadaalder series, of which this is the quarter, drew on the popular Joachimsthaler tradition while keeping Brederode's name on the coin rather than Philip II's. That was the point entirely. Brederode died in 1568, the same year the Dutch Revolt entered its open military phase, having spent years quietly financing opposition to Spanish authority partly through his own minting operations.