1 Pfennig - Louis

Leiningen-Westerburg was a tiny Rhenish county perpetually squeezed between larger territorial powers, and its copper pfennig coinage of the early seventeenth century reflects the patchwork monetary chaos that plagued the Holy Roman Empire before the Kipper- und Wipperzeit debased small denominations across the region wholesale. Louis I of Leiningen-Westerburg exercised minting rights that were, in practical terms, barely worth exercising — a 0.14g copper piece circulating among a few thousand subjects in a county that would spend much of the century fighting for its own survival.