1/4 Ducat

Zürich maintained the right to strike its own gold coinage well into the late seventeenth century, a privilege jealously guarded by the city council against recurring pressure from the Swiss Confederacy to harmonize coinage standards. These quarter ducats were produced across a span of two decades, though surviving examples cluster unevenly — certain years within the emission are substantially rarer than others, reflecting interruptions in the city's gold supply rather than any change in policy.

At under a gram of near-pure gold, these were working coins, not presentation pieces. Zürich's ducat series of this period is catalogued across at least four major references precisely because attribution disputes between die marriages kept specialists arguing for decades.