Frederick August II ascended the Saxon throne in 1836 as a constitutional monarch, the 1831 constitution having already stripped the crown of much of its absolute authority. These small copper pfennigs were the workhorses of everyday commerce in a kingdom still navigating the economic disruptions of early industrialization, when wage labor in the Erzgebirge textile and mining districts meant pfennig-level transactions were genuinely common.
KM#1155 spans a fourteen-year run cut short by Frederick August's death in 1854 — thrown from a carriage in the Austrian Tyrol while traveling.
Frederick August II ascended the Saxon throne in 1836 as a constitutional monarch, the 1831 constitution having already stripped the crown of much of its absolute authority. These small copper pfennigs were the workhorses of everyday commerce in a kingdom still navigating the economic disruptions of early industrialization, when wage labor in the Erzgebirge textile and mining districts meant pfennig-level transactions were genuinely common.
KM#1155 spans a fourteen-year run cut short by Frederick August's death in 1854 — thrown from a carriage in the Austrian Tyrol while traveling.