2 Sterlings

Aachen's sterlings of this period were struck under the city's imperial mint privilege, one of the few such rights granted directly by the emperor to a free city rather than a territorial lord. The denomination itself mirrors the influence of the English sterling and its continental derivatives — the *esterlin* type had circulated widely across the Rhineland and Low Countries since the mid-thirteenth century, and Aachen's civic coinage absorbed that tradition into its own municipal framework.

The Menadier 86e attribution places this among the later emissions of the series, a span of three decades during which Aachen navigated the commercial pressures of the Hanseatic trade network without formal membership in it.