1/2 Kreuzer - Frederick I

Baden's half kreuzer coinage of the 1850s occupies an awkward moment in German monetary history — the German states were actively negotiating what would become the Vienna Monetary Treaty of 1857, which standardized coinage across Austria and the southern German states and effectively rendered small copper fractions like this one administratively inconvenient within a year of striking. Frederick I had only recently assumed regent authority in Baden, his father Ludwig having been declared mentally unfit in 1852.