1/4 Thaler `Madonna` - Leopold Anton von Firmian

Leopold Anton von Firmian became Archbishop of Salzburg in 1727 after a candidacy heavily backed by the Habsburgs, and his early years in office were consumed less by ecclesiastical administration than by the brutal expulsion of some 20,000 Protestant Salzburgers in 1731–32 — one of the largest forced religious migrations in 18th-century Europe. This quarter thaler predates that expulsion by only a few years, struck while the confessional tensions that would produce it were already building toward crisis.

The Zöttl reference distinguishes two die varieties across the emission, which accounts for the paired catalog numbers.