Liard 'Aidant' - Ferdinand of Bavaria

Ferdinand of Bavaria held the Prince-Bishopric of Liège from 1612 until his death in 1650, simultaneously accumulating ecclesiastical titles across the Lower Rhine — Archbishop of Cologne, Bishop of Münster, Hildesheim, and Paderborn among them. This concentration of power in a single Wittelsbach prince was a deliberate Habsburg strategy to secure Catholic influence in the region during the opening decades of the Thirty Years' War. The copper liard circulated through a territory perpetually squeezed between larger powers, and its long production window reflects monetary continuity in a period when much of the surrounding region was anything but stable.