1/2 Ducat - Max Gandolf von Kuenburg

Max Gandolf von Kuenburg ruled the Archbishopric of Salzburg from 1668 to 1687, presiding during a period when the prince-archbishops of Salzburg wielded near-absolute temporal authority over their territory — a privilege jealously defended against both Habsburg encroachment and Protestant resurgence. He is better remembered for ordering the expulsion of roughly 1,000 Protestant miners and farmers from the Defereggen Valley in 1684, one of the more brutal confessional purges in the late seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. The Zöttl reference numbers spanning five varieties suggest the type was struck across multiple die pairs throughout his episcopate.