1/2 Kreuzer - Thomas Franz

Reichenau was a tiny ecclesiastical lordship on the Lake Constance island of the same name, its political authority derived entirely from the Benedictine abbey founded there in 724 AD. By the mid-eighteenth century the abbey's temporal power was effectively vestigial, making coinage issues like this one more an exercise in jurisdictional assertion than economic necessity. Thomas Franz von Schönau-Zell held the abbacy during a period when the Holy Roman Empire's smallest coin-issuing authorities were under sustained pressure from larger neighbors — Reichenau's coinage rights would not survive the century.