2 Pfennig - Jobst Edmund of Brabeck

Jobst Edmund von Brabeck became Prince-Bishop of Hildesheim in 1688 and spent much of his episcopate navigating the shifting confessional politics of the Holy Roman Empire's Lower Saxon Circle. Small silver pfennig issues of this type were struck as fractional currency for local market transactions at a moment when the bishopric's mint output was modest and intermittent. At 0.51 g, the silver content was marginal even by the debased standards of late 17th-century German petty coinage — a product of post-Thirty Years' War monetary exhaustion that still hadn't fully resolved by the 1690s.