Bracteat Gold

Bracteates of this weight class from the Lower Rhine duchies were struck as local trade tokens operating in parallel with heavier Rhenish gold — useful precisely because their tiny bullion value made small transactions possible without cutting coin. Guelders issued extensively in this format during the mid-fifteenth century, a period when the duchy was caught between Burgundian expansion and the ambitions of the Egmond dynasty, both of which demanded continuous liquidity for military and diplomatic payments.

The Delmonte gap in the reference number reflects genuine cataloguing uncertainty around these thin-flan pieces, many of which survive in too few examples to anchor firm die sequences.