Pfennig 'Vierzipfliger'

The "Vierzipfliger" — four-pointed or four-cornered — takes its name from the distinctive clipping pattern of its flan rather than any die characteristic, a minting shortcut common to small bracteate-adjacent issues in the Upper Rhine region during the late fourteenth century. Habsburg-Laufenburg was a cadet branch of the Habsburgs that had effectively been a diminishing territorial power since the division of 1232, and by the time these pfennigs were struck the county was already being absorbed piecemeal into the main Habsburg orbit.