1 Ducat - Christoph Bernhard of Galen Death

Christoph Bernhard von Galen — known to the Dutch as "Bommen Berend" for his relentless bombardment campaigns — died in September 1678, just months after signing the Treaty of Nijmegen that ended the Franco-Dutch War. This ducat was struck as a memorial issue, a practice common among German ecclesiastical states where the death of a prince-bishop occasioned both mourning coinage and a reassertion of dynastic continuity in the see.

Von Galen had spent much of his tenure embroiled in military adventurism that was extraordinary even by the standards of the bellicose prince-bishops of the Holy Roman Empire, twice besieging the city of Münster itself and allying opportunistically with Louis XIV against the Dutch Republic in 1672.