100 ECU - Beatrix Jacob van Campen

The ECU — European Currency Unit — was never legal tender in the Netherlands or anywhere else; it existed purely as a basket currency used for accounting within the European Monetary System. The Dutch mint nonetheless produced this and similar ECU-denominated collector pieces throughout the 1990s, a practice that skirted legality by issuing them under royal authority as medals with face values. Jacob van Campen designed the Amsterdam Town Hall, begun in 1648 — one of the largest secular buildings in seventeenth-century Europe, funded directly from Amsterdam's extraordinary commercial wealth at the peak of the Dutch Golden Age.