Dicken

Basel's civic coinage in the early sixteenth century operated under the authority of the city council, which had wrested monetary rights from the bishop by the late medieval period. The Dicken denomination itself was a Swiss innovation — introduced in the Confederation during the 1490s as a response to the large silver coins flooding in from Burgundy and the Tirol — and Basel's participation in striking them reflects its ambitions as a commercial center on the Rhine trade corridor.

HMZ 2#63b places this piece within a tightly documented sequence of Basel Dicken, where die combinations and subtle variations in the arms arrangement distinguish individual issues. 1521 is also the year Erasmus was resident in Basel, and the city's presses were producing some of the most politically charged texts in Europe — though the mint, predictably, stayed out of it.