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1 Thaler - Edzard II, Christoph and John

Issuer East Frisia
Year 1564
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Value 1 Thaler
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Reverse description The large composite armorial shield of East Friesland, displaying the Cirksena harpy eagle, is centrally positioned within a beaded inner circle. The eagle is depicted with spread wings, crowned, and with elaborately rendered feathering, in high relief. The circular legend surrounding the shield contains the abbreviated titles and names of the three ruling counts — Edzard II, Christoph, and John — in Latin. The overall design is characteristic of the heraldic thaler coinage of the North German princely states of the sixteenth century.
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East Frisia's coinage in the 1560s reflects the county's fractious dynastic politics almost perfectly. Edzard II, Christoph, and John were the three surviving sons of Edzard the Great, forced by inheritance custom to rule jointly — an arrangement none of them welcomed. The triple-named thaler is a direct artifact of that uneasy co-regency, struck to assert collective legitimacy at a moment when the brothers were actively disputing territorial division among themselves.

The joint reign effectively ended with the 1566 partition. Thalers naming all three rulers span only a narrow window, which keeps surviving examples thin on the ground.

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