Anselm Francis of Ingelheim served as Archbishop-Elector of Mainz from 1679 until his death in 1695, governing during the catastrophic aftermath of Louis XIV's Rhine campaigns — the same conflicts that devastated much of the Rhineland and permanently altered the political balance of the Holy Roman Empire's western territories. The albus was a small regional silver denomination with deep roots in the Rhenish monetary system, by the late seventeenth century already a coin of diminishing practical weight in a world increasingly dominated by larger silver strikes.
Anselm Francis of Ingelheim served as Archbishop-Elector of Mainz from 1679 until his death in 1695, governing during the catastrophic aftermath of Louis XIV's Rhine campaigns — the same conflicts that devastated much of the Rhineland and permanently altered the political balance of the Holy Roman Empire's western territories. The albus was a small regional silver denomination with deep roots in the Rhenish monetary system, by the late seventeenth century already a coin of diminishing practical weight in a world increasingly dominated by larger silver strikes.