Thaler

Basel's thalers of this period circulated widely beyond the city's own walls — the Swiss Confederation had no unified coinage, and individual cantons and city-states each struck their own silver to fill the gap. By the mid-eighteenth century, Basel's commercial position on the Rhine made its currency acceptable across a broad stretch of the upper Rhine valley and into the adjacent German territories. HMZ 2#99f places this among a tightly sequenced series of Basel thalers differentiated primarily by die variation in the shield quartering and minor legend spacing.