1 Ducat - Charles William Frederick

Charles William Frederick — known in Ansbach as "the Wild Margrave" — ruled Brandenburg-Ansbach from 1712 until his death in 1757, and his reputation for erratic, autocratic behavior made him one of the more colorful figures among the Hohenzollern cadet branches. His gold ducats were struck to the long-established Venetian ducat standard, a weight and fineness the Holy Roman Empire's trading networks had trusted for centuries. Ansbach's mint was never prolific, and gold issues from any point in his reign are encountered infrequently.

The decade this piece spans — 1740 to 1750 — brackets the opening of the War of Austrian Succession, in which Brandenburg-Ansbach's larger Hohenzollern cousin in Berlin was the central aggressor.