1 Thaler - John Frederick II and John William

John Frederick II ruled despite being stripped of the Electoral dignity — his father had lost it at Mühlberg in 1547, and the family never recovered it. By 1566, John Frederick II was himself imprisoned by Emperor Maximilian II following the Grumbach Affair, a conspiracy involving the Franconian knight Wilhelm von Grumbach that John Frederick had sheltered and supported. He would die in captivity in 1595, having spent nearly three decades under arrest.

This joint issue with his brother John William predates that imprisonment, struck during the last window of their co-regency before catastrophe closed in. Schnee 163 is among the scarcer documented varieties of the Ernestinian thaler sequence from this decade.