Daalder 'Arendrijksdaalder' - Maximilian II

The Arendrijksdaalder — "eagle reichsdaalder" — was struck jointly by the three Overijssel imperial cities of Deventer, Kampen, and Zwolle under imperial authorization from Maximilian II, whose portrait lent the issue its legitimacy during a period when the Habsburg Netherlands were fracturing under the weight of religious revolt. These cities held direct imperial status, answering to the Emperor rather than to Philip II, which gave their coinage a distinct political character from the provincial issues surrounding them.

The timing is everything: production spans precisely the years between the outbreak of the Eighty Years' War and the Union of Utrecht's political realignments, meaning these coins circulated through one of the most violent decades in Dutch urban history.