1 Pfennig - William VII

Hesse-Cassel's mint output in the 1660s was shaped almost entirely by the economic wreckage left by the Thirty Years' War, which had ended just seventeen years prior. William VII ruled only briefly — he died in 1670 at twenty-one, having never fully exercised independent authority during his minority. A silver Pfennig of this weight was among the smallest denominations the mint produced, struck in a period when copper had not yet displaced silver at the lowest end of the coinage hierarchy in many German states.