5 Thalers - Anna Amalia

Anna Amalia served as regent of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach from 1758 following the death of her husband Ernst August II, governing on behalf of her infant son Carl August until he came of age in 1775. This gold issue dates to the middle of that regency — a period when female-headed coinage from a minor German state was itself an administrative statement, not a ceremonial gesture. The Thuringian duchies struck relatively little gold, and regency-period issues are consistently underrepresented in collections.

Anna Amalia is better remembered today as the patron who assembled Weimar's literary circle, drawing Wieland, Herder, and eventually Goethe to court — but in 1764 that cultural project was still a decade away.