1578 Klippe 40 Stuivers

When the rest of the Habsburg Netherlands rose against Spain in the 1560s and 70s, Amsterdam was conspicuously absent. Alone among the major Holland cities it remained Catholic, with a Catholic-dominated town council, and stayed loyal to King Philip II long after Haarlem, Leiden, and the rest had thrown their support behind William of Orange and the Dutch Revolt.

On New Year's Day 1578 the rebel Dutch forces blockaded Amsterdam to force the city into the Union. The siege lasted two months. By early February the Catholic council had been replaced by a Protestant one in the so-called Alteratie, and the city formally joined the rebellion. During the siege itself, the council faced an immediate practical problem: there was almost no circulating coinage left inside the walls.

On 5 January 1578 the council authorised emergency silver coinage to be struck from "superfluous silver" - a delicate phrase that, in practice, meant the silver statue of Saint Nicholas, the Catholic patron saint of the city, melted down for bullion. (Yes - the same Saint Nicholas behind Sinterklaas and the modern Santa Claus.) The first issue klippes were struck on diamond-shaped flans with a full design including the city arms and a denomination cartouche.

It was not enough. On 3 February 1578 the council declared the existing 5 January issue revalued at five times its original face value, and authorised an entirely new second issue - cruder, uniface only, with the silver this time stripped from the candlesticks, vases, and lamps of the Nieuwe Kerk (the New Church). This piece is one of those second issues - a heavy 26.98-gram square klippe with the crowned arms of Amsterdam (three Saint Andrew's crosses pale) and a small dated cartouche reading 1578 / XL stamped into the silver, the reverse left entirely blank as struck.

NGC has graded this example AU 55 - the finest of the type ever certified by NGC. The crown, the city arms, and the date / denomination punch are all sharp and complete on heavy original silver, with the smooth uniface back showing the dark, even patina that uncleaned 16th-century siege silver develops. Documented in Dr. Lawrence Korchnak's "Siege Coins of the World, 1453-1902," the 1578 Amsterdam klippes are among the foundational pieces of obsidional numismatics - and a direct artefact of the moment Amsterdam, almost reluctantly, became the Protestant commercial capital of the new Dutch Republic.