1 Pfennig - David and Frederick Christopher

Mansfeld-Hinterort was one of several fractured lines of the Mansfeld county, a dynasty so prone to subdivision that by the early seventeenth century the family's copper-mining wealth was being split among branches that could barely sustain independent coinage. David and Frederick Christopher ruled jointly — a co-regency arrangement that was itself a symptom of that fragmentation. This pfennig was struck in 1623, the worst years of the Kipper und Wipper crisis, when debasement was so rampant across the German states that even tiny silver coins at this weight were being shaved, sweated, and counterfeited without pause.