6 Kreuzers - Georg Philip

Haldenstein was one of the smallest sovereign lordships in the Graubünden region of Switzerland, a territory so diminutive that its independent coinage output across the entire seventeenth century amounts to only a handful of types. Georg Philipp of Schauenstein-Ehrenfels, lord from 1680, issued this piece under the minting rights that theoretically derived from imperial privilege but were in practice exercised with considerable autonomy by Graubünden's micro-states. The billon alloy reflects chronic silver shortages that plagued small German and Swiss authorities throughout the latter half of the century, particularly after the sustained monetary disruptions of the Thirty Years' War had never fully resolved at the local level.