Eberhard IV of Eppstein-Königstein served as Bishop of Augsburg from 1508 until his death in 1535, a tenure that coincided with the opening ruptures of the Reformation — pressure that weighed heavily on every ecclesiastical mint in the German southwest. The Batzen denomination itself was relatively new currency by 1515, having emerged from Swiss and southern German minting practice in the 1490s as a practical response to the chronic shortage of mid-value silver coinage in regional trade.
The Forster/Schmidbauer reference number places this piece within a well-documented but genuinely scarce episcopal series.
Eberhard IV of Eppstein-Königstein served as Bishop of Augsburg from 1508 until his death in 1535, a tenure that coincided with the opening ruptures of the Reformation — pressure that weighed heavily on every ecclesiastical mint in the German southwest. The Batzen denomination itself was relatively new currency by 1515, having emerged from Swiss and southern German minting practice in the 1490s as a practical response to the chronic shortage of mid-value silver coinage in regional trade.
The Forster/Schmidbauer reference number places this piece within a well-documented but genuinely scarce episcopal series.