Dicken - Adrian I

The Bishopric of Sion — the ecclesiastical authority governing the Valais — minted its own coinage with unusual autonomy for a Swiss episcopal see, a privilege jealously defended against both Savoyard encroachment and, later, the encroaching influence of the Reformed cantons. The dicken was the workhorse denomination of early sixteenth-century Swiss monetary life, roughly equivalent in purchasing power to the German Groschen tradition from which it descends.

Adrian I von Riedmatten, who held the see from 1529 to 1548, navigated the diocese through the turbulence of the Reformation without abandoning Catholicism — the Valais remaining firmly Roman while Bern and Zurich broke away.