Franz Anton von Harrach served as Archbishop of Salzburg from 1709 until his death in 1727, but this kreuzer was struck only in the first three years of his tenure — a window that coincides with the final phase of the War of the Spanish Succession, during which Salzburg's mint was under considerable fiscal pressure to produce small denominations for local circulation. The archbishopric maintained its own mint at Salzburg continuously from the medieval period, one of the few ecclesiastical states in the Holy Roman Empire still exercising that right into the eighteenth century.
Franz Anton von Harrach served as Archbishop of Salzburg from 1709 until his death in 1727, but this kreuzer was struck only in the first three years of his tenure — a window that coincides with the final phase of the War of the Spanish Succession, during which Salzburg's mint was under considerable fiscal pressure to produce small denominations for local circulation. The archbishopric maintained its own mint at Salzburg continuously from the medieval period, one of the few ecclesiastical states in the Holy Roman Empire still exercising that right into the eighteenth century.