3 Gröscher - Frederick William I

Frederick William I inherited a Prussian treasury strained by his father's extravagances and responded with aggressive monetary debasement across small denominations. The 3 Gröscher issues of 1718–1723 fall squarely within his broader reform campaign — one driven less by monetary principle than by the need to fund his obsessive military expansion, particularly the buildup of the Potsdam Giants regiment. Billon coinage at this fineness was a practical extraction from the population, whose daily transactions depended entirely on such petty denominations.

KM#165 is known across multiple die varieties tied to specific mint years, and examples from the later end of the run tend to show softer detail attributable to heavily worked dies.