Plappart Small shield on cross

Zürich struck this Plappart under the monetary reforms following the city's entry into the Swiss Confederation, as municipal authorities worked to establish a reliable medium exchange distinct from the territorial coinages flooding the upper Rhine. The small shield variant distinguishes this emission from the earlier large-shield type — a heraldic adjustment that numismatists have long used to sequence the series, though the precise trigger for the change remains debated in the literature.

HMZ 2-1110b places this squarely within the billon coinage reorganization of the 1420s, when Zürich was also navigating the political fallout from the Toggenburg succession disputes that would eventually ignite the Old Zurich War.