1/8 Speciedaler - Christian IV

Christian IV's Norwegian coinage of the late 1620s was struck at a moment when the king was aggressively consolidating royal mining revenues — particularly from the Kongsberg silver mines, which had begun producing commercially exploitable ore only in 1623. The fractional speciedaler denominations were a direct instrument of that policy, converting raw Norwegian silver into circulating coin under explicit royal prerogative.

The .969 fineness is notably high, characteristic of early Kongsberg output before later debasements crept into the Danish-Norwegian coinage under fiscal pressure from the Thirty Years' War.