6 Pfennig - Frederick William

Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel had been dissolved as a political entity by Napoleon in 1807, absorbed into the short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia under Jérôme Bonaparte. Frederick William reclaimed his duchy only after Napoleon's catastrophic Russian campaign shifted the balance of power, and this 1814 issue belongs to that restoration moment — coins struck by a ruler who had spent years in exile commanding troops against the very regime that had dispossessed him. Frederick William would die at Quatre Bras in 1815, one of the few reigning German princes killed in action during the Napoleonic Wars.