2 Thalers - Lothair of Metternich

Lothair of Metternich governed Trier as archbishop from 1599 until his death in 1623, a tenure that straddled the opening catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War. This double thaler was struck just one year before the Defenestration of Prague, at a moment when the Rhineland electorate was already entangled in the confessional tensions that would soon reduce much of the region to ruin. Trier's archbishop held one of the seven imperial electoral votes, which made coins issued under his authority instruments of political identity as much as anything else.

The Dav CCT#5881A reference places this among the rarer documented varieties of the Trier double thaler series.