1 Groschen - John George I, Christian I, August, Rudolph and Louis

Anhalt was partitioned repeatedly across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by 1615 the principality was jointly administered by five co-ruling brothers simultaneously — an arrangement that produced some of the most administratively cluttered coinage in the Holy Roman Empire. All five names had to appear on a single small silver groschen, which is less a numismatic curiosity than a direct artifact of the inheritance laws that made consolidated rule nearly impossible in German dynastic territories.

The joint reign ended with the death of Christian I in 1630 and the gradual consolidation under fewer heirs. Coins from this five-brother period circulated for barely two years before the political arithmetic shifted again.