1 Thaler - Christophe Vidman St Veit

Ortenburg was a small imperial county in Lower Bavaria that had converted to Lutheranism in 1563 — a provocative act given its location deep within Catholic Bavarian territory. The Wittelsbach dukes spent the better part of a century attempting to suppress Protestant worship there, and the county's insistence on minting its own coinage was very much part of that same assertion of comital independence. By 1656, the right to strike thalers was itself a political gesture as much as an economic one.

Christophe Vidman served as mintmaster at St. Veit, and this issue is among the scarcest products of that facility. Dav EC II#3397 records very few surviving specimens.