In the Middle Ages, the golden seal was an object of quasi mythical nature. It was used to seal documents of the highest importance. The Golden Bull of Emperor Charles IV, an edict promulgated in 1356 at the Diets of Nuremberg and Metz to regulate elections in the Holy Roman Empire, is particularly famous. His son, Sigismund of Luxembourg (1369-1437), King of Hungary (1387) and King of the Romans (1410-1411), had his own seals minted as soon as he ascended the imperial throne in 1433. Three of Sigismund’s golden seals are extant: our copy, another preserved at the Frankfurt Institut für Stadtgeschichte, and the last one in the collections of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Lambrecht in Austria. They date from the last years of his reign, between 1433 and 1437.

The craftsmanship is of highest quality. At the time, it was nearly impossible to strike pieces of this size, so that the planchet had to be pushed back into the matrix. The total weight of one side must have been about 40 g, which corresponds to 12 Hungarian florins with 3.50 g of gold. Together with the lost reverse, which showed an idealized view of the city of Rome, the whole seal weighed between 80 and 100 g in gold. It shows the emperor in his older years, slim and bearded. Portrayed from the front with all of his imperial insignia, he is seated on a cushion on a gothic throne and wrapped in a heavy ceremonial cloak, wearing a crown and holding a lilied sceptre in his right hand and an orb in his left.

Most of these golden seals were later melted down. The one kept in our collection narrowly escaped this sad fate: the planchet of the reverse has disappeared, and a quarter of the obverse – otherwise very well preserved – was brutally cut away, leaving some cracks. Oral tradition has it that the missing part was used to buy food during World War II. This particular item is said to have come from the family of the Poniatowski princes in Katowice, Poland.