1/4 Thaler - Henry II and Gotthelf Wilhelm

Mansfeld-Schraplau was one of several partitioned lines of the fractious Mansfeld county, a territory that spent much of the sixteenth century dividing and subdividing its copper- and silver-rich lands among competing heirs. Henry II and Gotthelf Wilhelm ruled jointly under the co-lordship arrangements that characterized late Mansfeld governance — a system that produced an enormous variety of short-lived coinage types before the entire county was absorbed by electoral Saxony following the Mansfeld bankruptcy proceedings of the early seventeenth century.

The two-year window of this issue reflects just how rapidly administrations turned over in the terminal decades of Mansfeld independence.