1 Ducat

Augsburg's 1689 ducat was struck just one year after the city found itself uncomfortably entangled in the opening moves of the Nine Years' War, with French forces under Louis XIV pushing hard against the Rhine frontier and the Holy Roman Empire scrambling to assemble a coherent defense. As a Free Imperial City, Augsburg retained the right to strike its own coinage — a privilege it guarded jealously and exercised continuously even as the surrounding political situation deteriorated.

The city's gold ducats of this period are tied closely to its role as one of the great banking and mercantile centers of Central Europe, a position inherited from the Fugger era and still functional, if diminished, in the late seventeenth century.