3 Kreuzer

St. Gallen's late 18th-century small coinage occupied an awkward political moment: the city and the abbey of St. Gallen had been locked in jurisdictional tension for centuries, and the city's independent mint issues of this period were partly an assertion of that autonomy against both abbatial and Habsburg pressure. The Swiss Confederation was less than three years from the French invasion that would end the Old Confederacy entirely. This piece belongs to one of the final emission cycles before 1798 collapsed the city's minting rights altogether.