The times of Sigismund II Augustus were the heyday of the Vilnius mint. Already after the death of Sigismund the Old, the Sejm passed a resolution to close the mints in the Crown and Prussia, which was opposed by, among others, Prince Albrecht and precisely the city of Gdansk. As Marian Gumowski recalls in the Gdansk Mint,"under the pretext of the lack of a pass coin and obligations to the staff, already in 1549 he began to mint denars, shekels, ducats." In the following years, with further applications, the city began issuing pennies and, looking at the number of pieces that have survived to this day, a small issue of trojaks.
The present piece is a nice representative of the first vintage of Danzig trojaks of this king.
The second type of this issue: without the border on the obverse and the lily under the date.
A rare item.
