1 Speciedaler - Christian IV King bust, type 3

Christian IV established Glückstadt in 1617 as a deliberate commercial rival to Hamburg, and the mint there served as much as a political instrument as a monetary one — each heavy speciedaler a small assertion of Danish ambition over the powerful Hanseatic city downstream. By the mid-1640s, however, that ambition had been badly damaged. Denmark's disastrous intervention in the Thirty Years' War culminated in the Peace of Brömsebro in 1645, which stripped the Crown of territories and exempted Sweden from the Sound Toll.

These dalers were struck in the immediate aftermath of that humiliation, under a king who had already lost an eye at the Battle of Kolberger Heide the year prior.