4 Pfennig - Charles August Frederick

Waldeck-Pyrmont in the early eighteenth century was a tiny, perpetually cash-strapped territory whose rulers relied heavily on mercenary troop contracts — leasing soldiers to larger powers — just to keep the administration solvent. Charles August Frederick came to rule a principality that had been divided and reunited multiple times within living memory, and small copper issues like this one were essentially fiduciary stopgaps, filling a chronic shortage of small-denomination coinage that larger mints had no interest in supplying. The Holy Roman Empire's fragmented monetary system actively encouraged this kind of local copper production.