Rappen

Basel's civic coinage of the mid-eighteenth century occupied an awkward monetary position — small billon pieces like this rappen circulated alongside a chaotic mix of cantonal, imperial, and foreign coins that Swiss authorities repeatedly tried and failed to rationalize before the Helvetic Republic swept the system away in 1798. The city-state jealously guarded its minting rights as a mark of political autonomy even as the coins themselves had negligible intrinsic value.

HMZ 2#108a distinguishes this emission by die characteristics documented in Divo and Tobler's reference corpus for Swiss cantonal coinage.