Pfennig 'Vierzipfliger'

The Vierzipfliger — "four-cornered" — takes its name from the distinctive clover-leaf flan shape produced when a round blank was struck with a square die, forcing the metal out at four points. This was not an aesthetic choice but a practical one: it allowed quick visual authentication by market traders who could identify genuine pieces by outline alone without weighing them. The Habsburg-Laufenburg line, a cadet branch that had split from the main Habsburg dynasty in the mid-thirteenth century, controlled a strategically awkward pocket of territory along the upper Rhine and was extinct by 1408.