Dicken - Thomas I

Haldenstein was among the smallest sovereign entities in the Holy Roman Empire — a tiny lordship in the Graubünden region of what is now Switzerland, whose right to strike coin was perpetually contested by neighboring powers. Thomas I of Brandis held the lordship from around 1608 and exploited the minting privilege aggressively, producing silver dicken that circulated well beyond the territory's negligible geographic footprint. The Swiss-German dicken denomination itself had largely fallen out of fashion by the early seventeenth century, making this a somewhat anachronistic issue even at the time of striking.