5 Ducats - Franz Ernst

The Schlick family's fortunes were inseparable from silver — it was their mines at Joachimsthal in Bohemia that produced the Joachimsthaler in the early sixteenth century, the coin whose name eventually contracted into "thaler" and, much later, "dollar." By 1652, however, the family had lost direct control of those mines long before, their Bohemian properties stripped following the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, when Count Heinrich Schlick was executed and the family's political standing gutted by Habsburg reprisals against the Protestant nobility.

This gold multiple, struck under Franz Ernst, represents an assertion of dynastic prestige at a moment when the family was rebuilding from those confiscations.