8 Ducats

1631 was the year Nuremberg found itself at the center of the Thirty Years' War's most catastrophic phase — Swedish forces under Gustav Adolf used the city as a strategic base, and the siege conditions that followed produced one of the war's great humanitarian disasters. Multi-ducat presentation pieces of this type were not minted for commerce. They served as diplomatic gifts and were distributed to military commanders and allied princes whose goodwill the city needed to survive.

Nuremberg's goldsmiths maintained .986 fineness standards with unusual consistency across the war decades, a detail that made their large gold pieces trusted instruments of negotiation when trust itself was scarce.