Goldgulden

1622 places this coin squarely in the opening years of the Thirty Years' War, when Swiss cities were navigating extreme monetary pressure from the conflict engulfing the surrounding Holy Roman Empire. Zürich, though not a direct combatant, faced currency debasement flooding in from German states desperate to finance their campaigns — the so-called Kipper- und Wipperzeit, a period of systematic coin clipping and debasement that destabilized trade across central Europe between roughly 1619 and 1623.

Zürich's response was to maintain its gold coinage at near-fine purity — the .986 fineness here is not incidental, but a deliberate assertion of monetary reliability in a debased neighborhood.