Schilling

Uri was among the smallest and most landlocked of the Swiss cantons, yet its position controlling the Saint Gotthard Pass gave it economic leverage far exceeding its size. The Talschaft — the assembly of valley freemen — exercised minting rights jealously, and this billon schilling belongs to an eighteen-year emission that coincides almost exactly with the most destructive phase of the Thirty Years' War raging across the border in German lands. Swiss neutrality kept Uri's passes commercially vital even as Central Europe collapsed around it.

Billon coinage from small Swiss cantons of this period is notoriously inconsistent in alloy quality, and Uri was no exception to that tendency among the Waldstätten mints.