2 Schilling

Lübeck's billon schilling issues of the early eighteenth century reflect the city's stubborn insistence on monetary independence long after its commercial dominance had faded. Once the leading power of the Hanseatic League, by 1727 Lübeck was a city of roughly 25,000 people clinging to free imperial city status — and the right to strike its own coinage was one of the few tangible expressions of that autonomy still exercised in practice.

KM#142 falls within a series produced under tight bullion constraints, the .437 fineness itself a concession to the economic pressures that had been grinding down Lübeck's silver reserves since the Thirty Years' War.