Liard - Ferdinand of Bavaria

Ferdinand of Bavaria held the Prince-Bishopric of Liège from 1612 until his death in 1650, simultaneously occupying the archbishopric of Cologne — an accumulation of ecclesiastical offices that kept him perpetually entangled in the politics of the Thirty Years' War. These copper liards were struck at a moment when the southern Low Countries were economically exhausted, and small-denomination copper coinage was being debased or counterfeited across the region at an alarming rate. Liège's nominal neutrality in the broader conflict did little to insulate its monetary system from the surrounding chaos.