3 Pfennig - Damian Hartard of the Leyen

Damian Hartard von der Leyen held the archiepiscopal throne in Mainz for less than a decade, from 1675 until his death in 1678, an unusually short tenure for a see that typically commanded long incumbencies. This minor silver issue falls squarely within the post-Westphalian period when the ecclesiastical princes of the Holy Roman Empire were aggressively reasserting monetary prerogatives that had been disrupted by thirty years of war and the economic devastation that followed. The Archbishopric of Mainz, as one of the three ecclesiastical electors, retained the right to strike its own coinage well into the eighteenth century.