1/4 Thaler - Frederick I

Frederick I of Prussia acquired Neuchâtel in 1707 through a contested succession in which the principality's council chose him from among fifteen rival claimants — partly on Protestant grounds, partly on the logic that a distant king would interfere less than a nearby French duke. The arrangement was genuinely peculiar: a Hohenzollern ruling a French-speaking Swiss enclave as a separate sovereign principality, entirely distinct from his Prussian crown. This 1713 issue falls squarely within that awkward early period of Prussian suzerainty, minted just as the War of Spanish Succession wound down at Utrecht.