⅔ Thaler Bicentenary of the Reformation

The 1717 Reformation bicentenary was one of the most heavily commemorated events in the early eighteenth-century German states, with dozens of ecclesiastical and secular authorities issuing medallic coinage to mark two hundred years since Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. Stolberg-Stolberg's participation is notable given the county's persistent Lutheranism throughout the Thirty Years' War, during which the region suffered repeated occupation and financial exhaustion. That a small, cash-poor county still struck a commemorative at this weight class says something about the political importance of confessional loyalty in the post-Westphalian order.

The ⅔ Thaler denomination — equivalent to the Gulden — was the dominant circulating silver unit across much of Protestant northern Germany at this date.