1/2 Thaler

Kempten's status as a free imperial city was under sustained pressure by 1623, caught between the jurisdictional ambitions of the neighboring Kempten Abbey and the wider destabilizations of the Thirty Years' War, then in its fifth year. The city exercised its minting rights with some urgency during this period — civic coinage was a concrete assertion of autonomy at a moment when that autonomy was genuinely in question.

The Nau 192 b/a designation indicates a die pairing variant within the type, distinguishing it from the closely related Nau 192 a/a documented by Haertle at #325.