1 Thaler - Sede Vacante

Sede Vacante issues were struck by cathedral chapters during the vacancy between a bishop's death and the confirmation of his successor — a period in which the chapter held temporal as well as spiritual authority and asserted that right through coinage. The Bishopric of Lübeck's 1727 vacancy followed the death of Christian August, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, who had held the see since 1705. The chapter wasted little time; these thalers functioned as much as a political statement of interim sovereignty as a circulating coin.

The Bishopric of Lübeck was a Protestant prince-bishopric, an arrangement that had persisted since the Peace of Westphalia formalized such anomalies across the Empire.