10 Ducats - Maximilian I

The Teutonic Order by 1610 was a shadow of its medieval military self — stripped of Prussia in 1525 when Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg converted to Lutheranism and secularized the territory, the Order had retreated to its remaining holdings in the Holy Roman Empire under the protection of the Habsburgs. Maximilian I, as Hoch- und Deutschmeister from 1590 to 1618, governed an institution that had reinvented itself as a purely Catholic religious-chivalric body, dependent on Habsburg patronage and increasingly ceremonial in function.

Large multiple-ducat pieces of this type were prestige objects, not circulation coinage. Fr#3379A is among the rarer recorded strikings from this administration.