1 Daalder 'Lion Daalder' Date obverse

The Lion Daalder — Leeuwendaalder in Dutch — was one of the most commercially successful silver coins ever struck in the Low Countries, deliberately undervalued domestically to encourage export. Merchants and the VOC shipped them by the chest-full to the Levant, the Baltic, and eventually the East Indies, where local traders accepted them at face value or above. West Friesland was among the provincial mints authorized to strike them, and the 1604–1605 dating places this piece in the earliest years of the type's widespread adoption following the 1575 Union of Utrecht framework that loosely standardized provincial coinage.