Ducat

The Abbey of Rheinau was a Benedictine house on a tight loop of the Rhine near Schaffhausen, granted limited coinage rights that it exercised only sporadically across the early eighteenth century. This 1710 ducat falls within a small cluster of issues the abbey produced before those rights were effectively curtailed — the canton of Zürich absorbed Rheinau's temporal authority in stages, and by the mid-century the abbey's independent monetary activity had all but ceased. Ducats from Rheinau appear across multiple major Swiss references precisely because so few were struck; the abbey never functioned as a serious mint, and each issue was more assertion of ecclesiastical privilege than practical monetary output.