1 Thaler - Jérôme Bonaparte Mining Thaler Mule

A mule combining dies not intended to appear together, this piece pairs mining thaler dies in copper rather than the silver of a standard circulating thaler. Jérôme Bonaparte's Kingdom of Westphalia was a Napoleonic creation — assembled in 1807 from Prussian, Hanoverian, and Brunswick territories — and its mining thalers were tied directly to the Harz silver workings that had financed German princes for centuries. The Müseler reference places it firmly in the specialized literature on German mining coinage, which treats these issues as semi-official pieces connected to mine administration rather than general circulation.

The copper fabric here almost certainly indicates a pattern or proof-of-die strike rather than a production error reaching the public.