Neuss had no inherent right to strike thalers — the city obtained minting privileges through imperial grant, and this issue belongs to a period when Neuss was leveraging those rights aggressively during recurring tensions with the Archbishop of Cologne, whose territorial ambitions repeatedly threatened the city's autonomy. The long striking window across nearly two decades suggests multiple die marriages rather than a single continuous run, and Noss's classification of the variety as 37a distinguishes it from closely related emissions that are frequently misattributed in trade.
Neuss had no inherent right to strike thalers — the city obtained minting privileges through imperial grant, and this issue belongs to a period when Neuss was leveraging those rights aggressively during recurring tensions with the Archbishop of Cologne, whose territorial ambitions repeatedly threatened the city's autonomy. The long striking window across nearly two decades suggests multiple die marriages rather than a single continuous run, and Noss's classification of the variety as 37a distinguishes it from closely related emissions that are frequently misattributed in trade.