6 Grossus - Carl of Saxony Mitau

Carl of Saxony held the Duchy of Courland in a state of near-permanent political crisis — his tenure was contested by both the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose king technically approved ducal appointments, and by Russian imperial pressure that would ultimately extinguish the duchy entirely in 1795. This 1762 issue falls in the final stretch of that precarious autonomy, the same year Catherine II seized power in Russia and tightened her grip on Baltic affairs.

Courlandic coinage of this period is catalogued under multiple overlapping reference systems precisely because the duchy occupied an ambiguous jurisdictional space — neither fully sovereign nor fully absorbed.