1 Pfennig - Christoph

Christoph of Württemberg inherited a duchy stripped of assets and burdened with the debts of his exiled father Ulrich, yet by the end of his reign had restored both the territory's finances and its Protestant ecclesiastical structure under the landmark church ordinance of 1559. These small billon pfennigs circulated through that rebuilding period, funding a duchy that had only been returned to Württemberg control via the Treaty of Münsingen in 1534. The .313 fineness places it firmly in the debased small-denomination coinage typical of mid-sixteenth-century southwestern German principalities, where silver content was perpetually squeezed to manage chronic fiscal shortfalls.