Duit

Holland's duit coinage of the 1590s was struck while the province was simultaneously funding the early campaigns of the Eighty Years' War and financing the first Dutch merchant expeditions to the East Indies. Small copper was perpetually short in the occupied Netherlands, and the provincial mints ran near-continuously to keep fractional currency in circulation. The Holland issues of this period are distinguished from those of the other provincial mints by subtle differences in the arms rendering that collectors have used to attribute examples since Verkade's classification work.