Esterlin - Jean the Blind

Jean l'Aveugle — John the Blind — inherited Luxembourg in 1309 and spent the following decades fighting virtually everyone else's wars across Central Europe before dying at Crécy in 1346, reportedly charging blind into the English archers rather than leave the field. The esterlin was his workhorse denomination, modeled closely on the English sterling that dominated pan-European trade silver during the early fourteenth century.

Luxembourg's adoption of the esterlin form reflects the monetary pull of English coinage types across the Low Countries and Rhineland at the time — local lords issued imitations not from lack of imagination but because merchants demanded familiar weights and fabric.