A very rare numismatic souvenir of the time of the great interregnum.
During the interregnum, which prevailed after the heirless death of Sigismund Augustus, Gdansk, which was the main trading city of the Republic, did not stop producing coins. Before the first electoral king of Poland was elected, it minted two denominations: denars and shekels. And the latter, rarer today, are more interesting, as they contain the titulature of the king who died a year earlier (July 7, 1572). On the obverse of the coin containing an Eagle with a sword, we can read in the legend in the rim SIGIS - DEI - GRA - REX - POLONI +(Sigismund, by God's grace King of Poland).
This issue was not continued in the following years and it was not until 1577 that Gdansk began minting coins related to the siege of the city. It is also worth noting that in 1578, after the end of hostilities, Danzig returned to this iconography in the first vintage of Batory's Danzig shekels.
