Patas - Frédéric-Henri

Frederick Henry of Nassau held Orange as a sovereign principality while simultaneously serving as Stadholder of the Dutch Republic — a jurisdictional oddity that allowed him to strike coins in his own name on French soil even as the Thirty Years' War reshaped every border around him. The Principality of Orange was a tiny enclave in Provence, entirely surrounded by French royal territory, and Louis XIII spent much of this same period scheming to absorb it. That he never managed it during Frederick Henry's lifetime left this copper coinage in legitimate circulation well into the 1640s.