4 Schilling Lübisch 'Reuterpfennig' - John

The "Reuterpfennig" — literally cavalryman's penny — takes its name from its intended function: small silver pieces struck in quantity to pay mounted troops during the opening years of the Thirty Years' War. The Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg was among the minor north German territories pressured into producing emergency military coinage as the conflict drew closer to the Danish sphere. John, Duke of Sonderburg, held one of the subdivided lines of the fractured Holstein-Sonderburg house, and his coinages from this period are among the more obscure issues of the Kipper und Wipper debasement cycle.