2 Schillings - August

Ratzeburg occupied an awkward political position in the years just before the Thirty Years' War — a Protestant bishopric administered under the terms of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, where the office had passed to Lutheran administrators despite remaining nominally ecclesiastical. August, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, held the see from 1603 until his death in 1636, issuing coins under episcopal authority that reflect that hybrid Lutheran-territorial character. This issue falls precisely in the window when confessional tensions across the Empire were tightening toward the catastrophe of 1618.