1/4 Daalder 'Madonnadaalder' - Margaretha IV van Brederode

The Abbey of Thorn was one of the few ecclesiastical institutions in the Low Countries with the rare privilege of independent coinage rights — a status it jealously protected through repeated legal disputes with neighboring secular authorities well into the sixteenth century. Margaretha IV van Brederode, who held the abbacy from 1557 to 1577, issued this quarter during a period when the broader Netherlandish revolt against Habsburg rule was beginning to fracture regional monetary authority in ways that made locally-issued silver increasingly significant for day-to-day commerce in Limburg.

The 'Madonnadaalder' designation applied to this series derives from the Marian iconographic tradition deeply embedded in Thorn's institutional identity — the abbey having been founded as a chapter of canonesses, not a cloistered order, giving its abbesses unusual autonomy and public-facing authority uncommon among female religious houses.