Groningen Silver Gros

Groningen's Silver Gros often bore the provincial arms, a rampant lion that doubled as a subtle middle finger to Spanish overlords during the Eighty Years' War.

That lion wasn't just for show; it helped these coins pass as legal tender in markets from Amsterdam to Emden, despite their modest silver content. Weighing around 1.5 grams, they were struck in local mints using whatever silver was handy—sometimes repurposed from older coins or trade scraps.

Exact mintage figures? Gone with the wind, or more precisely, lost in various 17th-century fires that swept through Dutch archives. We know production peaked around 1580 under the States of Groningen, but that's about it.

One oddity: these gros sometimes turned up in hoards with foreign coins, as if they'd gatecrashed the party.