1672 Siege Thaler (Noodmunt)

1672 is remembered in the Netherlands as the Rampjaar - the Disaster Year. France, England, Münster and Cologne fell on the Dutch Republic at once, and the eastern provinces were overrun in weeks. Kampen, on the IJssel, was among the cities that found itself cut off, its treasury emptied and its normal coinage supply gone.

The answer, as in every siege from Leyden to Middelburg, was emergency money. The city's silver - plate, guild cups, whatever could be gathered - went to the dies, and the results were struck quickly and plainly: the three-towered city gate of Campen inside a shield, the city's name spelled out beneath it, and on the reverse nothing but words. NE CESSIAS ALTERA, 1672 - "do not give way to the other" - a motto of refusal hammered into silver at the moment the city's survival was genuinely in doubt.

These emergency issues were made to be spent, and most were: melted back down the moment normal coinage returned. Survivors in this state, with full sharp lettering and the original crude beaded borders intact, are genuinely scarce.

This example carries one of the great American numismatic pedigrees - Archer Milton Huntington, the railroad heir, Hispanist and founder of the Hispanic Society of America, whose coin cabinet was among the most important ever assembled in private hands in the United States.