15 Kreuzers - George Philip

Haldenstein was a tiny imperial lordship in the Graubünden region of what is now eastern Switzerland, and its right to strike coin was perpetually contested by its neighbors. George Philip of Schauenstein-Ehrenfels, who held the lordship, issued coins like this one in the late seventeenth century largely as an assertion of jurisdictional independence rather than out of any economic necessity — the territory's population and trade volume barely justified a mint at all. The 1689 date places this squarely in the period of the Nine Years' War, when silver was being pulled toward military expenditure across the Empire.