3 Pfennig - Constantine of Buttlar

Constantine of Buttlar served as Prince-Abbot of Fulda from 1714 until his death in 1726, presiding over an institution whose secular authority as an imperial abbey gave it the right to strike its own coinage. This small billon issue appeared near the end of his tenure, when the abbey's fiscal position was under strain from the enormous building campaigns he had sponsored — including continued construction on the Baroque cathedral begun under his predecessor.

The Buttlar family connection carried political weight in the Franconian ecclesiastical world, but it did not insulate the abbey from the grinding economics of small-denomination minting in the early eighteenth century. At 0.42g, these pieces were struck close to the minimum practical weight for the denomination.