Gold Zecchino - William Henry

The Principality of Orange was a tiny sovereign enclave surrounded entirely by French territory, and Louis XIV spent much of his reign engineering its absorption. William Henry — better known as William III of England — ruled Orange in name but rarely in practice; French troops occupied the principality for extended periods during the Nine Years' War, and Louis formally annexed it by force in 1713, a decade after William's death. These zecchini were struck on the Venetian standard, a deliberate signal of legitimate sovereign coinage rights that Orange's rulers pressed hard to maintain against French pressure to suppress them.