4 Pfennige - Charles August

Charles August ruled Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach during a period when the duchy was punching well above its political weight — Goethe was still active at court, and Weimar had become something of an intellectual capital of the German states. This copper issue belongs to a coinage reform effort undertaken by the smaller Thuringian states in the early 1820s, as the German Confederation pressed toward greater monetary standardization. Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach was among the more cooperative of the minor duchies in this process, though full regional harmonization wouldn't arrive until the Conventions of the following decades.