Catalog
See full images - free registration
Continue with Google - no registration!
or register with email
Why register? Just to keep bots out of our catalog. Your email stays private - we will never share it or send you anything uninvited. We guarantee you that!
Goldgulden - Matthias
| Issuer | Chur, City of |
|---|---|
| Year | 1618 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | 1 Goldgulden (3) |
| Currency | Log in to see details |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Weight | Log in to see details |
| Diameter | Log in to see details |
| Thickness | Log in to see details |
| Shape | Log in to see details |
| Technique | Log in to see details |
| Orientation | Log in to see details |
| Engraver(s) | Log in to see details |
| In circulation to | Log in to see details |
| Reference(s) | Log in to see details |
| Obverse description | Full-length figure of Saint Luke, the patron saint of Chur, standing facing, vested as a bishop and wearing a mitre. The saint holds an imperial orb in his raised right hand and a crosier in his left hand. The legend encircles the figure in the field, incorporating the last three digits of the date (618) at the end of the inscription. The design is executed in the robust, somewhat rustic hammered style characteristic of early seventeenth-century Swiss municipal gold coinage. |
|---|---|
| Obverse script | Log in to see details |
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Log in to see details |
| Reverse script | Log in to see details |
| Reverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Edge | Log in to see details |
| Mint | Log in to see details |
| Mintage | 1618 |
| Additional information |
Chur's right to strike gold coinage was never uncontested. The city held an imperial mint privilege, but throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that privilege sat in tension with the Bishop of Chur, whose own minting authority overlapped uncomfortably with the civic one. The 1618 goldgulden — struck in the same year the Thirty Years' War began — was issued under a municipal authority that would spend much of the coming decades simply trying to survive the political fracturing of the Graubünden region, caught between Habsburg, French, and Spanish interference.
The Matthias attribution places this firmly in the final years of that emperor's reign; he died in 1619 without a direct heir, triggering the succession crisis that deepened the war.