1/2 Guldiner - Matthaüs Lang von Wellenburg

Matthäus Lang von Wellenburg was not a man who came to the archbishopric through piety. A career diplomat and humanist in the service of Maximilian I, he accumulated ecclesiastical offices across the Empire before being appointed Archbishop of Salzburg in 1519 — and promptly spent much of his early tenure suppressing a violent peasant uprising that nearly drove him from the city in 1523. This half guldiner was struck just a year before that revolt.

The guldiner series from Salzburg represents some of the earliest large silver coinage in the German-speaking lands, building on the precedent set by Hall in Tyrol decades earlier. Zöttl 212 is among the scarcer die combinations in Lang's short minting sequence.