1 Thaler - John Frederick I and George

John Frederick I and his brother George ruled jointly over Ernestine Saxony following the death of their father John the Steadfast in 1532. The co-rulership was short-lived — George died in 1539 — but these joint issues capture a transitional moment when Lutheran Saxony was consolidating its identity against both imperial pressure and the ongoing fractures of the Reformation. John Frederick would later lose the electorate entirely at Mühlberg in 1547, making the Ernestine thalers of the 1530s the high-water mark of that branch's political authority.