1 Dreiling

The Dreiling — literally "three-ling," a coin worth three pfennig — was the workhorse small denomination of the northern German Hanseatic cities during the mid-sixteenth century. Lübeck's issues of this period were struck under the authority of a city-state still nominally at the height of its commercial power, though the 1550s marked the beginning of a structural decline in Hanseatic dominance over Baltic trade as Dutch shipping interests increasingly undercut the League's centuries-old network.

At under two-thirds of a gram, production consistency across a five-year emission range was almost impossible to enforce by hand at the die.