3 Pfennig - John Casimir and John Ernest

John Casimir and John Ernest ruled Saxe-Coburg-Eisenach jointly under the terms of their father's inheritance settlement — a dynastic arrangement common among the Ernestine Wettin branches, who subdivided Thuringian territories so repeatedly through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that cartographers struggled to keep pace. This issue dates to the thick of the Thirty Years' War, when the small Ernestine duchies were caught between confessional alliances and the military movements of imperial and Protestant forces through central Germany.

Small silver fractions like this one circulated heavily in wartime conditions, when larger denominations were hoarded and debased coinage flooded local markets during the Kipper- und Wipperzeit currency crisis of the early 1620s.