1/2 Thaler - Moritz

Moritz of Hesse-Cassel — known to posterity as "der Gelehrte," the Learned — came to power in 1592 at age fifteen, and this half thaler was struck in the first full year of his reign. His father Wilhelm IV had built Hesse-Cassel into a center of astronomical research, hosting Tycho Brahe and maintaining one of the most sophisticated observatories in the empire. Moritz inherited that intellectual ambition but redirected it toward music, theater, and religious reform, eventually pushing a second Reformation onto his territories in 1605 and alienating much of his nobility in the process.

The Schütz III reference places this among the documented early coinage of his reign, before the political turbulence that would ultimately force his abdication in 1627.