1/2 Thaler - Charles Albert

Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schilingsfürst was one of the smaller partitioned lines of the Hohenlohe dynasty, a family whose territorial fragmentation across Franconia produced an almost absurd proliferation of coinage rights exercised by rulers governing populations in the low thousands. Charles Albert held the county under the loose authority of the Holy Roman Empire, which still recognized the minting privileges of such minor princes even as those privileges were becoming economically meaningless. By 1770, large silver thaler-denomination coinage from entities this small was issued more for prestige and legal tender formality than genuine monetary need.