100 Dollars - Charles III Milan & Prague

The pairing of Milan and Prague in a single issue is historically coherent in a way that often goes unremarked: both cities served as seats of Habsburg imperial power, Milan from 1535 and Prague most prominently under Rudolf II, whose court there from 1583 to 1612 became the strangest and most intellectually dense in Europe. Rudolf essentially abandoned Vienna, dragging the imperial apparatus northward into Bohemia and filling Prague Castle with alchemists, astronomers, and an obsessive art collection that Napoleon's troops would later loot in quantity.

The Tiffany glass inlay technique used in this series — developed for the New Zealand Mint — requires the glass to be kiln-fused directly into a recess in the coin blank, a process that rejects a significant proportion of planchets at inspection.