4 Ducats - Johann Christian and Georg Rudolf Oels

Oels was a small Silesian appanage duchy carved out of the Piast inheritance, and by 1622 its co-rulers Johann Christian and Georg Rudolf were caught in the opening devastation of the Thirty Years' War. Silesia, nominally Protestant and nominally Habsburg, was watching Bohemia burn after the Battle of White Mountain two years prior. Large gold multiples like this four-ducat piece were not circulation coinage — they functioned as diplomatic gifts, military payments to officers, or portable wealth extraction in an increasingly unstable region.

The Piast line in Silesia would die out entirely with Georg Rudolf in 1653, after which the Habsburgs absorbed the remaining territories directly.