2 Pfennig - Hieronymus von Colloredo

Hieronymus von Colloredo is remembered today almost exclusively as Mozart's employer — and the man Mozart despised. As Archbishop of Salzburg from 1772, Colloredo was an ardent Josephinist reformer who curtailed Church ceremony, dissolved monasteries, and overhauled the principality's finances. This minor copper issue dates to the final years of his secular rule; the French Revolutionary Wars would soon upend the ecclesiastical states of the Holy Roman Empire entirely, and Colloredo was permanently driven from Salzburg by Napoleon's forces in 1800, ending centuries of archiepiscopal coinage.