1/2 Thaler - Beda Angehrn

Beda Angehrn served as Prince-Abbot of Saint Gall from 1767 until the abbey's dissolution in 1805, one of the last abbots to exercise the full temporal and spiritual authority that had made Saint Gall one of the most powerful ecclesiastical principalities in the Swiss Confederation. These half thalers were struck during a narrow three-year window, and the HMZ reference places them among a small cluster of silver issues from his reign. The abbey's coinage rights, held since the medieval period, were exercised sparingly by the late eighteenth century.

Saint Gall was dissolved under Napoleonic pressure in 1805 — making any silver issue from Angehrn's tenure a product of an institution within a generation of its end.