1 Dreier - Joachim Frederick of Brandenburg

Joachim Frederick administered Magdeburg as Protestant administrator — not archbishop — following the Peace of Augsburg's compromise arrangement that allowed Lutheran princes to hold ecclesiastical territories without papal consecration. The arrangement was perpetually contested, and his coins occupy an awkward canonical space: struck with the authority of an archbishopric by a man Rome never recognized as its head.

The Dreier, a three-pfennig piece, was the workhorse of small commerce in northern German territories throughout the late sixteenth century.