6 Pfennig

Dortmund's autonomy as a Free Imperial City was already under sustained pressure during the decades this coin circulated — the city's political and economic weight had been declining since the Thirty Years' War stripped the Westphalian towns of much of their commercial vitality. These small silver pieces were struck under municipal authority precisely because that authority was worth defending, even symbolically. The city would lose its free status entirely in 1803 under Napoleonic reorganization.

The thirty-year production window suggests multiple die marriages; Bergh 229b distinguishes this variety from closely related emissions of the same period.