1 Thaler - John George I, Peter Ernest I and Christoph II

Mansfeld's copper mines had made the county one of the wealthiest territories in sixteenth-century Saxony, but the comital house compulsively subdivided its lands among heirs, producing a bewildering succession of joint-rule coinages. This thaler names three counts simultaneously because all three held legal authority over Eisleben at the time of striking — a fragmentation that would eventually bankrupt the dynasty entirely. The Mansfeld counts defaulted on massive debts to the Fugger banking house by the early seventeenth century, and imperial administration was imposed in 1570 as a direct consequence of precisely this kind of partitioned governance.