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3 Pfennig
| Issuer | Mühlhausen, Free imperial city of |
|---|---|
| Year | 1621-1622 |
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| Currency | Thaler |
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| Obverse description | Single-sided (einseitig) hammered copper klippe-style uniface issue depicting the imperial double-headed eagle of Mühlhausen displayed with wings spread, the heads facing outward to left and right respectively. The denomination numeral '3' appears above each wing in the upper field, flanking the eagles' heads, with the last two digits of the mint year positioned in the lower left and right fields beside the eagle's body. The design is struck in bold relief characteristic of emergency Kipper-period coinage, with the eagle rendered in the conventional heraldic style of early seventeenth-century German municipal issues. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | This is a uniface (einseitig) coin with no reverse design; the reverse is blank and featureless, showing only the plain copper planchet surface as typical of Kipper-period emergency single-sided coinage. |
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| Additional information |
Mühlhausen's copper pfennig issues of 1621–22 fall squarely within the Kipper und Wipperzeit — the catastrophic currency debasement crisis that swept the Holy Roman Empire in the early 1620s. Municipal and territorial mints across Germany raced to produce low-value copper coinage while simultaneously clipping and sweating silver, destabilizing trade networks from Saxony to the Rhine. Mühlhausen, as a free imperial city with minting rights, was both a participant in and a victim of this spiral.
KM#16 is among the smaller denominations the city struck during this period, when even three pfennig in copper represented a meaningful transaction for ordinary commerce increasingly stripped of reliable silver.