1 Thaler - Christoph Bernhard of Galen

Christoph Bernhard von Galen — "Bombenbernd" to his contemporaries — was one of the most militarily aggressive prince-bishops in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. This thaler was struck just over a decade before he laid siege to Münster's own city in 1661, having quarreled bitterly with the Protestant-leaning civic council over jurisdictional authority. The siege worked: the council capitulated, and von Galen ruled the city as absolute ecclesiastical sovereign for the remainder of his tenure.

His later alliance with England against the Dutch Republic (1665–1667) was financed in part through Spanish subsidies, making thalers of this period functionally instruments of international power politics.