Rappen

Rappen) originally was a variant of the medieval Pfennig ("penny") coin common to the Alemannic German regions of Alsace, northern Switzerland and south-western Germany.

[1][2] The origin of the term can be traced back to the Rappenpfennig, a form of the penny minted in Freiburg im Breisgau in the 13th century featuring an eagle, which later on was interpreted to depict a raven (German Rabe; the word is thus a cognate of its German homophone Rappen referring to a "raven"-black horse).

After the dissolution of the Rappenbund in 1584, a number of Swiss states continued to mint rappen within their territories, where they remained in local use until the middle of the 19th century.

In 1798, when Switzerland was politically unified by the French under the Helvetic Republic, a unified currency was needed to standardise the widely differing currencies of the so-far sovereign Swiss states (up to then about 860 different coins had been used in Switzerland).

However, many of the newly independent Cantons of Switzerland now minted their own, localised versions of decimal franc, batzen, and rappen currencies, until Switzerland was again politically unified in 1848 and the modern Swiss franc was issued to replace the local currencies in the Federal Coinage Act of 1850.