½ Kreuzer - Ferdinand III Kuttenberg

Ferdinand III issued this small silver piece through the Kuttenberg (Kutná Hora) mint during a period when Bohemia was still absorbing the fiscal devastation of the Thirty Years' War, which had ended only in 1648. The war had gutted the Bohemian economy, debased the coinage repeatedly through the Kipper- und Wipperzeit crisis of the early 1620s, and left the mint infrastructure badly strained. This issue represents part of the slow normalization of the silver coinage in the war's immediate aftermath.

Kutná Hora had been a major silver-producing center since the medieval period, though by the mid-seventeenth century its mines were well past peak output.