1 Rappen

Freiburg's civic coinage of the fifteenth century emerged from the city's precarious balancing act between Habsburg overlordship and its own municipal ambitions. The rappen denomination itself takes its name from the raven device used by the Margraves of Hachberg, whose coinage circulated widely in the upper Rhine region before local mints adopted the type wholesale. At 0.32 g, these tiny silver pieces were the workhorse of everyday market transactions in a city whose linen and grain trades demanded reliable small change that the larger territorial coinages simply could not serve.