1 Daalder 'Leeuwendaalder' Divided date reverse, knight without plume

The leeuwendaalder was never intended for domestic Dutch commerce. It was minted almost exclusively for export, feeding the enormous appetite for silver coinage in the Levant trade and the Baltic markets, where it circulated by weight alongside other European crowns. Utrecht struck prodigiously throughout the final decades of the seventeenth century precisely because demand from VOC and merchant networks consistently outpaced supply from Holland and Zeeland.

The knight-without-plume variety reflects a provincial die workshop decision, not a deliberate policy change — Utrecht's engravers periodically updated punch combinations, producing identifiable sub-varieties that Delmonte catalogued separately. The divided date placement on the reverse is the distinguishing diagnostic for this specific type within the KM#72 grouping.