1/4 Thaler - Henry II

Mansfeld-Schraplau was one of the smallest and most financially precarious of the Mansfeld partition counties, a consequence of the catastrophic inheritance divisions that fragmented the Mansfeld comital holdings across the sixteenth century. By the 1590s, Henry II was ruling a territory barely capable of sustaining independent coinage, and the county's mining revenues — drawn from the copper-rich Harz foothills — were already in steep decline. The fiscal pressure to coin heavily from diminishing ore yields is well documented in the Mansfeld administrative records.

Tornau 1006b distinguishes this emission from closely related die pairings within the type.