1 Ducat - Joseph Clemens

Joseph Clemens of Bavaria was appointed Archbishop-Elector of Cologne in 1688 at age seventeen, a nakedly political maneuver by his Wittelsbach family to extend dynastic influence over the Rhineland electorate. His reign almost immediately collapsed under the weight of that politics: when he backed the French candidate during the War of the Grand Alliance, Emperor Leopold I had him suspended and then exiled in 1702, handing the see to a Habsburg ally. This 1694 ducat was struck during the narrow window of his functional rule before that rupture.