1 Thaler - William Frederick Ernest

Schaumburg-Lippe was among the smallest sovereign territories in the Holy Roman Empire — fewer than 20,000 subjects at mid-century — yet William Frederick Ernest maintained a mint and issued full thalers in part to project an authority his geography barely supported. The 1765 date places this coin in the middle of his long reign, which ran from 1748 to 1777, a period when the count was simultaneously building an outsized military reputation as a reformer of Portuguese artillery and infantry during the Seven Years' War.

The Davenport reference to GT II#2764 places it within the German territorial series, where Schaumburg-Lippe issues are consistently underrepresented in collections relative to the larger German states.