Ducat - Placidus von Zurlauben silver trial

Trial pieces for the Abbey of Muri are exceptionally rare survivals of the ecclesiastical minting process, produced to test dies before committing to a gold striking. This piece corresponds to the abbacy of Placidus von Zurlauben, who held office at Muri in the early eighteenth century. The abbey held coinage rights as an imperial institution, though by 1720 such privileges were increasingly nominal — Swiss ecclesiastical minting was in its final decades before secularization would extinguish it entirely.

The silver fabric here is the diagnostic detail: ducats were gold by definition, making this a die trial rather than a currency issue.