1 Dreier

Goslar's civic coinage rights stemmed from its position as an imperial free city and its historic ties to the Rammelsberg silver mines, among the richest ore deposits in medieval Europe. By 1616, however, those mines were in serious decline, and the city's fiscal position was deteriorating ahead of the ruinous decades the Thirty Years' War would bring from 1618 onward. Small-denomination silver like this Dreier circulated hard in such conditions. The BBK 252a designation distinguishes this from closely related die variants documented by Buchenau and Brozatus in their cataloguing of Lower Saxon municipal issues.