Pfennig Bracteate

Krosno — then part of the Silesian duchy system under Habsburg suzerainty — issued emergency bracteate pfennigs during 1621–1622 amid the monetary chaos unleashed by the Kipper und Wipper crisis, a speculative debasement spiral in which mints across the Holy Roman Empire raced to produce underweight, debased small coinage for short-term fiscal gain. Municipalities and minor lordships struck their own emergency issues precisely because the currency system had become so corrupted that local authorities could no longer trust imperial coinage for everyday transactions.

The bracteate form itself — a thin, single-die struck piece — was already archaic by the seventeenth century, a deliberate return to a medieval format driven entirely by metal scarcity.