20 Kreuzers - Francis Louis of Erthal

Francis Louis of Erthal served as Prince-Bishop of Würzburg from 1779 until his death in 1795 — the same year this coin was struck. An Enlightenment reformer who abolished torture in his territories and overhauled the university, he governed through a period of mounting French revolutionary pressure on the ecclesiastical states of the Holy Roman Empire. This coin dates to the final year of his life and, as it turned out, nearly the final years of the Bishopric itself: French forces would occupy Würzburg in 1796, and secularization followed in 1803.

Issues from this final year of his reign are noticeably scarcer than earlier Erthal-period kreuzers.