1 Reichsthaler - Christopher of Manderscheid Bust

Christopher of Manderscheid-Schleiden served as Prince-Abbot of Stavelot-Malmedy from 1546 until his death in 1572, presiding over the abbey during one of the more turbulent stretches of the Reformation's spread through the Low Countries and Rhineland. The abbey held the right to strike coin as an imperial fief, and these thalers were issued under that authority in the final years of his abbacy — a period when Calvinist pressure on ecclesiastical lordships throughout the region was acute enough that several neighboring church territories lost their temporal power entirely.

Delmonte's corpus remains the standard reference for this series, and S#511 is among the more elusive of the Stavelot abbatial thalers by surviving population.