1 Thaler - Louis Death

Louis I of Anhalt-Köthen died in 1624 having founded the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft — the Fruitbearing Society — in 1617, the first major German-language literary society, which counted hundreds of nobles among its members and ran for over a century. Death thalers of this type were a standard mourning convention among German Protestant principalities, but Anhalt-Köthen's version carries particular weight given Louis's outsized cultural influence relative to the territory's modest size. Köthen itself was a tiny principality; the coin's ambition was not.