2 Thalers - Henry XXXI

Henry XXXI of Schwarzburg ruled a small Thuringian county at precisely the moment the Thaler format was consolidating as the dominant large silver denomination across the German-speaking lands — a direct consequence of the massive silver strikes in Joachimsthal beginning in 1519. A double Thaler at this date is an early and ambitious issue; most minor German counts were content to strike single pieces, and the financial and technical resources required to produce a consistent 70-gram silver blank were non-trivial for a county of Schwarzburg's scale. Very few examples are recorded, and MB#6 with the Davenport cross-reference suggests a type known primarily from a handful of institutional collections.