Why Are There So Many Dated European Coins From 1475 Ad?

In a recent OFEY thread focused on pre-1600 coins http://goccf.com/t/467708), I wondered why there seemed to be so many European coins with 1475 dates. I've done a little more digging into Robert Levinson's, "The Early Dated Coins of Europe 1234-1500"and wanted to report out here my results.

Levinson assigns a rarity scale with the most common group estimated at 251 or more pieces collectable. He does note that for a few of these common types, the numbers extant likely exceed 1000 pieces and specifically calls out 1475, 1477, 1482, 1492, and 1500 as being dates where specific coinages were super-high.

I went through each date in this book for each of the five geographic regions (Germany, Southern Low Countries, Northern Low Countries, Habsburgs, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Italy, and France) looking for types that were listed as Common. Germany and the Southern Low Countries had the most types, with 18 and 17, respectively. Both the Northern Low Countries and Habsburg Territories had four types, while none of the remaining geographic regions had any. I tallied these 39 types by year and produced the below frequency plot.




Frequency plot of issues considered "Common" by Levinson between the dates 1444 and 1500. The date of interest for this thread (1475) is shown in red.



A few things to note: 1499 was actually the year with the most dated types that are listed as Common; however, only three mints are represented: Schneeberg (x1), Antwerp (x2), and Dordrecht (x4). 1475 has five types that are common, but interestingly they all come from different mints (Cleve, Freiberg, Leipzig, Antwerp, and Bruges). Two dates (1477 and 1478) both have four Common types. Additionally, seventeen different years have either one or two Common type.

It seems quite reasonable to conclude that there *are* more coins dated 1475 compared with most other years in the 15th Century, but why is this case? It was typical for mints of this time to produce coins periodically as presumably this effort was only undertaken when there was both demand for the coinage and supply of metal stock since some of the mints were semi-autonomous, for-profit endeavors. Perhaps the mints in the first year after a period of quiescence were extra busy? This theory seems to work well for Cleve (34 years since previous dated issuance), but less so for Freiberg (6 years) and Leipzig (6 years). On the other hand, the mints of Antwerp and Bruges had both produced dated issues the previous year. For both of these last two mints, 1474 was the first year that dated coins had been produced in those mints. Levinson speculates that the simultaneous minting of dated coins starting in 1474 for Flanders, Brabant, and Gelderland was not likely at the direction of the Archduke looking to standardize the weight and design of the coins of his realm due to Flanders continuing to produce undated coins plus plentiful use of non-standard dies. Perhaps it was more of a suggestion from the Archduke?

I'm not sure that I'm offering much in the way of answers with this post, but hopefully the thread gains some traction among folks who are more knowledgeable about these things. Also, feel free to post your 1475-dated coins on this thread that are listed as Common. Here are three of the five from my collection:

Cleve Groschen (Levinson I-137):



Leipzig in Saxony Spitzgroschen (Levinson I-148):



Brabant Double Briquet (Levinson II-17):