1 Thaler - Hermann Werner of Metternich

Hermann Werner von Metternich ruled Paderborn as prince-bishop from 1683 until his death in 1704, a tenure shaped almost entirely by the catastrophic disruptions of the Nine Years' War. Louis XIV's campaigns through the Rhineland and Westphalia devastated the ecclesiastical finances of the region, making large silver strikes of this kind genuinely expensive administrative decisions rather than routine production. The 1694 date places this thaler squarely in the closing years of that conflict, just before the Peace of Ryswick in 1697 brought temporary relief to the battered western German territories.

Paderborn's mint output under Hermann Werner was modest, and thalers of this bishop are scarcer than their Cologne or Münster counterparts from the same decade.