4 Pfennig - Maximilian of Horrich

Corvey, the Benedictine abbey on the Weser River, held minting rights intermittently across centuries but exercised them with particular frequency under its prince-abbots in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Maximilian of Horrich, who governed the abbey from 1714 to 1721, issued this copper pfennig piece during a period when the abbey's secular territorial authority was increasingly contested by neighboring Prussian and Hanoverian interests — small denominational coinage like this was partly a political assertion of jurisdictional independence as much as practical currency.

Corvey's copper issues from this period are sparsely documented; the Ilisch/Schwede corpus remains the authoritative reference for Westphalian ecclesiastical coinage precisely because standard numismatic literature passes over these minor abbatial strikes almost entirely.