Guldiner

Fribourg's large silver coinage of the seventeenth century was produced by a city that had remained Catholic through the Reformation and operated with considerable financial independence within the Swiss Confederation. The canton maintained its own mint through most of this period, though production was intermittent and output figures are poorly documented — partly why the HMZ catalog groups these across a seventy-year span rather than by discrete issue.

The Guldiner denomination itself traces to the late fifteenth century as an attempt to produce a silver coin equivalent in value to the Rhenish gold gulden. Fribourg's late issues in this series are scarcer than their Zurich or Bern counterparts.