1 Thaler - Leopold Anton von Firmian

Leopold Anton von Firmian became Archbishop of Salzburg in 1727 after a career defined more by political maneuvering than pastoral vocation — his appointment was itself a compromise candidate outcome among competing Habsburg factions. He is remembered less for this coinage than for the 1731–32 Salzburger Emigration, in which he expelled somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 Protestant subjects from the archbishopric, one of the largest forced religious displacements in 18th-century Europe. This thaler was struck just three years before that expulsion order.