1 Thaler 'Schautaler' - Anselm Francis of Ingelheim

Anselm Franz von Ingelheim was elected Archbishop of Mainz in 1679, inheriting a see still rebuilding after the devastation of the Thirty Years' War and the French occupation of the Rhineland. This piece is a Schautaler — a display thaler struck not for circulation but for presentation, gifting to dignitaries, or court ceremony. Such pieces were common among the ecclesiastical princes of the Holy Roman Empire, who used them as political currency of a different kind. The 1687 date places this squarely in the shadow of Louis XIV's ongoing aggression in the Rhine territories, with Mainz increasingly caught between French ambition and imperial obligation.