Clemens Wenzel of Saxony was the last Archbishop-Elector of Trier, appointed in 1768 through the influence of his aunt Maria Theresa and holding the see until the French Revolutionary armies effectively ended ecclesiastical rule in the Rhineland in 1794. This coin was struck just five years before that collapse — part of the routine small-denomination copper coinage of an ancient ecclesiastical principality whose days as an independent political entity were already numbered. The Archbishopric had exercised temporal authority over the Moselle region since the early medieval period.
Clemens Wenzel died in exile in Augsburg in 1812, never returning to Trier.
Clemens Wenzel of Saxony was the last Archbishop-Elector of Trier, appointed in 1768 through the influence of his aunt Maria Theresa and holding the see until the French Revolutionary armies effectively ended ecclesiastical rule in the Rhineland in 1794. This coin was struck just five years before that collapse — part of the routine small-denomination copper coinage of an ancient ecclesiastical principality whose days as an independent political entity were already numbered. The Archbishopric had exercised temporal authority over the Moselle region since the early medieval period.
Clemens Wenzel died in exile in Augsburg in 1812, never returning to Trier.