Thaler

Schaffhausen's thalers of this period were struck during the opening years of the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that fractured the Holy Roman Empire and sent monetary systems across Central Europe into chaos. As a Free Imperial City on the Rhine, Schaffhausen retained the right to coin silver independently, a privilege it exercised jealously. The city's mint drew on local commercial wealth tied to Rhine river trade rather than any mining interest of its own.

The HMZ reference places this among a tightly documented Swiss thaler sequence. The 1620–1624 window brackets the Battle of White Mountain and the immediate Protestant collapse in Bohemia — events that directly disrupted silver supply chains feeding Swiss mints from Central European sources.