1 Thaler - Ferdinand

The Bishopric of Hildesheim spent much of the early seventeenth century in a protracted legal and military struggle to recover secularized church territories — a dispute settled, temporarily, by the 1629 Edict of Restitution, which briefly restored Catholic ecclesiastical holdings across the empire. Ferdinand of Bavaria, who held the see during this period, was simultaneously Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, accumulating episcopal offices with a consistency that made him one of the most powerful ecclesiastical princes of the Thirty Years' War. Hildesheim thalers from these years circulated in a region that changed military hands repeatedly before the Peace of Westphalia reversed the Restitution entirely.