Ulm struck these emergency issues — the name "Notbatzen" means roughly "necessity Batzen" — during the War of the Spanish Succession, when the city found itself financially squeezed between competing imperial obligations and the practical collapse of normal coin supply in the region. The city had backed the Habsburg cause, and by 1703 French and Bavarian forces were pressing into southern Germany, disrupting trade routes and draining municipal reserves.
The emergency authorization came from the city council, not the imperial mint system. Ulm lost its status as a free imperial city less than a century later, in 1802.
Ulm struck these emergency issues — the name "Notbatzen" means roughly "necessity Batzen" — during the War of the Spanish Succession, when the city found itself financially squeezed between competing imperial obligations and the practical collapse of normal coin supply in the region. The city had backed the Habsburg cause, and by 1703 French and Bavarian forces were pressing into southern Germany, disrupting trade routes and draining municipal reserves.
The emergency authorization came from the city council, not the imperial mint system. Ulm lost its status as a free imperial city less than a century later, in 1802.