2 Ducats - Frederick William

Frederick William — the future "Great Elector" — was barely into his reign when these ducats were struck, having inherited Brandenburg-Prussia in 1640 at age twenty amid the grinding final years of the Thirty Years' War. Much of his territory was under Swedish or Imperial occupation, and his financial authority was precarious enough that gold coinage of this period served as much as diplomatic currency as domestic tender.

The Friedberg reference places this among the rarest Brandenburg ducats of the mid-seventeenth century. Few survive outside major institutional collections.