1 Thaler - Anthony of Schaumburg

Anton von Schaumburg served as Archbishop of Cologne from 1556 until his death in 1558 — a reign so brief that his coinage is thin in both variety and surviving population. This thaler was struck in the second year of his tenure, almost certainly at the Deutz or Bonn mint, during a period when the archbishopric's fiscal operations were under significant strain from territorial disputes with the Duchy of Cleves. Noss's exhaustive cataloguing of Cologne ecclesiastical coinage treats this type with notable care precisely because the die combinations are few and the surviving examples well-documented.