1½ Thaler

The 1618 date places this piece at the opening year of the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that would devastate the economy of Lower Saxony and ultimately strip many ecclesiastical cities — including Hildesheim — of financial and political autonomy. The city had been producing thaler-denomination silver in the early seventeenth century while still navigating the unresolved tensions between its Catholic cathedral chapter and the Protestant-leaning municipal government, a division formalized in the so-called Hildesheim Capitulation of 1643.

The 1½ thaler denomination itself was minted specifically for trade and larger transactions, never intended for daily circulation.