3 Patards - Ernest of Bavaria

Ernest of Bavaria held the bishopric of Liège from 1581 until his death in 1612, one of several sees he accumulated as part of the Wittelsbach family's aggressive ecclesiastical consolidation across the Holy Roman Empire. He simultaneously held Cologne, Münster, Hildesheim, and Freising — a plurality that made him one of the most politically influential churchmen of the Counter-Reformation, though his actual pastoral record was negligible. Liège's billon small-denomination coinage of this period was driven by chronic silver shortages and the monetary disruptions of the Eighty Years' War bleeding into the southern Low Countries.