2 Thalers - John George I Klippe, Baptism

Struck to commemorate the baptism of John George I's son Augustus in 1614, this klippe — a square-format blank deliberately chosen to distinguish presentation pieces from circulating coinage — was never intended to pass through hands as money. Saxon electoral workshops produced such pieces in quantity for court gift-giving, and baptismal klippen in particular were distributed to noble guests as tangible markers of dynastic continuity. John George I would go on to rule Saxony through the catastrophic opening decades of the Thirty Years' War, making the optimism embedded in a baptismal issue like this one historically pointed.