2 Pfennigs - Joseph

Saxe-Altenburg's copper small change of the 1840s was struck under Duke Joseph, whose duchy was among the more compact of the Thuringian states — a patchwork of micro-territories that had survived the Napoleonic reorganization largely by dynastic accident. The Congress of Vienna confirmed these arrangements, leaving dozens of German statelets issuing their own copper pfennig coinage well into the mid-nineteenth century, even as commercial pressure toward monetary unification was already mounting. The North German Thaler convention would eventually render most of this local copper redundant.