1 Thaler - Francis of Ketteler

Corvey, originally founded as a Carolingian Benedictine house in 822, had by the sixteenth century accumulated enough secular authority to strike its own coinage — a privilege that put it in direct tension with the surrounding Prince-Bishopric of Paderborn. Francis of Ketteler served as Prince-Abbot during a period when the Reformation was fracturing ecclesiastical power across Westphalia, and minting a thaler of this weight and ambition was partly a political assertion of continued Catholic institutional standing.

The 1543–1544 double dating reflects production that straddled the new year under the old calendar reckoning still common in Imperial mints at the time.