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1 Thaler - John Frederick II, John William and John Frederick III

Issuer Saxony (Ernestinian Line), Electorate of
Year 1560
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Shape Round
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Obverse description Armored half-length bust of a Duke of Saxony facing right, depicted in elaborate Renaissance plate armor with decorative etching and a ruff collar, holding a sword at his side. A small escutcheon bearing the Saxon arms appears at the bottom of the inner circle. The bust is contained within a beaded inner circle, with the peripheral legend reading MO NO FRATV M DVCV SAXO: distributed around the field. The coin is struck in the typical hammered style of mid-16th century Saxon thalers, with a granular border visible at the rim.
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Obverse lettering MO NO FRATV M DVCV SAXO:
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Additional information

By 1560, the Ernestinian Saxons had already lost the electoral dignity to their Albertine cousins following the Schmalkaldic War — John Frederick I's defeat at Mühlberg in 1547 cost his line both the vote and the bulk of Saxony proper. The three rulers named on this thaler were governing what remained: a reduced territorial patchwork in Thuringia, struck under the fiction of joint rule that the Ernestinian inheritance system perpetually imposed on the dynasty.

Three-ruler coinages create immediate attribution headaches, and the Ernestinian issues of the 1550s–60s are no exception. Schnee 150 sits within a tightly clustered group of die marriages; collectors working the series closely track subtle armorial differences between otherwise near-identical emissions.

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