Gold Guilder

Metz maintained its status as a free imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire, retaining minting rights that most French-controlled cities had long since surrendered. These guilders were struck across a period spanning the French Wars of Religion and the early decades of Catholic-Protestant tension that would eventually culminate in the Thirty Years' War — pressures that made Metz's political independence a matter of active negotiation rather than passive inheritance.

Fr#164 is among the scarcer Rhenish-type gold issues from the Lorraine region, with surviving examples concentrated in a handful of European institutional collections.