1 Pfennig - Frederick Charles August

Waldeck-Pyrmont occupied an awkward position in the late eighteenth-century German political order — nominally independent but perpetually cash-strapped, its treasury chronically reliant on the controversial practice of selling soldiers to foreign powers, most notoriously to Britain for service in the American Revolutionary War. Small copper issues like this pfennig kept local commerce functional during decades when the principality's human export trade generated more revenue than its entire domestic economy.