1 Thaler - Frederick II

Frederick II of Hesse-Cassel is best remembered — or condemned — for leasing roughly 19,000 Hessian troops to the British Crown in 1776, a transaction that financed his court extravagantly while sending his subjects to die in the American Revolutionary War. The subsidy money funded construction at Wilhelmshöhe and filled the state treasury far beyond what normal taxation could achieve. This thaler predates that arrangement by a decade, struck during a period when Hesse-Cassel was still rebuilding financially after the Seven Years' War, which had ended just two years prior and left much of the electorate economically exhausted.