1 Rappen

Schwyz was among the founding cantons of the Swiss Confederation, but its cantonal coinage remained sparse and irregular well into the seventeenth century. This billon rappen dates to a period when Swiss monetary circulation was a chaotic patchwork of cantonal, episcopal, and foreign issues, with no federal standardization — that would not arrive for nearly two centuries. The extreme lightness of this piece reflects the near-total debasement of small billon coinage across the region by the 1670s, when silver content in such denominations had effectively become nominal.