4 Pfennig - Philip of Spiegel zum Desenberg

Corvey Abbey's temporal authority over coinage survived well into the eighteenth century largely through legal inertia — the Holy Roman Empire's fragmented minting privileges were notoriously difficult to revoke once granted. Philip of Spiegel zum Desenberg served as Prince-Abbot from 1758 until the abbey's secularization pressures mounted under Napoleonic reorganization, making issues from his tenure among the last coherent coinage series the abbey would produce. Billon struck at this late stage for ecclesiastical mints was already an anachronism by 1765, as most German secular princes had long abandoned debased small coinage in favor of copper.