1 Thaler - Joseph Frederick

Saxe-Hildburghausen was among the smallest and most financially precarious of the Saxon duchies, perpetually dependent on subsidies from the imperial court in Vienna and, later, from larger German neighbors. Joseph Frederick — who ruled from 1780 until the duchy's absorption into Saxe-Meiningen in 1826 — struck relatively few thalers across his reign, and the 1781 issue comes from the opening years of his rule, when the tiny court at Hildburghausen was still maintaining the pretense of independent fiscal dignity that a thaler coinage implied.