1/3 Thaler - Francis Maximilian and Francis Henry

Mansfeld-Bornstedt was one of the fragmented sub-counties produced by the repeated partition of the Mansfeld territories among competing lines of the Mansfeld family — a process that had been generating numismatic chaos since the sixteenth century. By 1673, Francis Maximilian and Francis Henry were co-ruling a county barely viable as a political unit, its silver mining output a shadow of what the Mansfeld region had once contributed to Saxony's economy. Joint-ruler issues from these terminal Mansfeld lines are scarce simply because the issuing authority rarely survived long enough to produce them in volume.