1/2 Dreiling - George II

Saxe-Lauenburg had effectively ceased to exist as a sovereign duchy in 1689, when the male line died out with Julius Franz and Denmark absorbed the territory. By 1739, when these half-Dreilings were struck, the duchy had been under Hanoverian administration for over two decades following George I's acquisition of it — a claim pursued through his mother Sophia Dorothea's inheritance rights. That George II continued issuing coins under the Saxe-Lauenburg title was a deliberate assertion of a separate feudal claim, distinct from his Hanoverian electorate, even as the territory functioned as little more than an administrative appendage.