Mansfeld's copper mines had made the county one of the wealthiest territories in the Holy Roman Empire by the mid-sixteenth century, and the counts exercised their minting rights aggressively — issuing joint coinage under multiple co-rulers simultaneously, as dynastic partition had divided the county into parallel lines still sharing certain privileges. Peter Ernest I would later achieve far greater fame as a military commander under Habsburg service, eventually governing the Spanish Netherlands for over a decade, but in 1558 he was simply one of three counts squabbling over silver output from the same exhausted ore seams.
Mansfeld's copper mines had made the county one of the wealthiest territories in the Holy Roman Empire by the mid-sixteenth century, and the counts exercised their minting rights aggressively — issuing joint coinage under multiple co-rulers simultaneously, as dynastic partition had divided the county into parallel lines still sharing certain privileges. Peter Ernest I would later achieve far greater fame as a military commander under Habsburg service, eventually governing the Spanish Netherlands for over a decade, but in 1558 he was simply one of three counts squabbling over silver output from the same exhausted ore seams.