2 Thalers - Leopold I Hall

Hall's mint, operating in what is now Schwaz district of Tyrol, was one of the most productive silver operations in the Habsburg domains, fed directly by the Schwaz mines that had made the region fabulously wealthy since the fifteenth century. By the 1680s that mining dominance had faded, but Hall retained its mint privilege and continued striking large silver multiples for prestige and trade purposes. Leopold I's protracted wars against the Ottomans — the siege of Vienna fell in 1683, just two years before this piece — created urgent fiscal pressure across the Habsburg lands, and large-denomination silver issues served as much for diplomacy and payment of mercenary forces as for domestic commerce.

Herinek 570 is a two-year type, distinguished within the series by specific die characteristics documented by Ludwig Herinek in his 1974 census of Austrian baroque coinage.