Mathilda of Jülich ruled Guelders as regent following the death of her husband Renaud III, navigating a duchy perpetually squeezed between the ambitions of the Habsburgs, the Bishops of Utrecht, and the Duke of Brabant. The Rijnse Goudgulden — the Rhenish gold gulden — emerged from a monetary convention binding several Rhenish ecclesiastical electors who agreed to standardize a gold coinage, and Guelders, though not a formal member of that convention, produced imitative issues to compete in the same trade circuits.
Mathilda's issues from this period are among the rarest secular Guelders gold coinages of the fourteenth century, with very few specimens documented in major collections.
Mathilda of Jülich ruled Guelders as regent following the death of her husband Renaud III, navigating a duchy perpetually squeezed between the ambitions of the Habsburgs, the Bishops of Utrecht, and the Duke of Brabant. The Rijnse Goudgulden — the Rhenish gold gulden — emerged from a monetary convention binding several Rhenish ecclesiastical electors who agreed to standardize a gold coinage, and Guelders, though not a formal member of that convention, produced imitative issues to compete in the same trade circuits.
Mathilda's issues from this period are among the rarest secular Guelders gold coinages of the fourteenth century, with very few specimens documented in major collections.