Dicken City

Chur, as the oldest city in Switzerland and seat of the Bishop of Chur, had long maintained minting rights, but the early seventeenth century saw the city navigating an extraordinarily volatile political moment — the Fähnlilkrieg of 1618 and the subsequent factional violence of the Graubünden civil conflicts repeatedly destabilized the region's institutions. The Valtellina crisis, which drew Spanish, French, and Venetian interference directly into Graubünden affairs from 1620 onward, gave urgent practical weight to maintaining a reliable local silver coinage.

The Dicken denomination itself corresponds to the Taler-fraction tradition, struck at roughly one-third Taler weight.