1534 (1640s restrike) 2 Thaler

In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the German peasantry split into a constellation of new sects. One of the most extreme was the Melchiorite branch of the Anabaptists, who - alone among the early Anabaptist communities - preached communal ownership of property, the outright abolition of money, and a militant cult of personality around their prophets. Modern historians have, with reasonable accuracy, called what they built in 1534-35 a medieval communist religious sex-and-death cult.

In early 1534 two prophets, Jan Matthys and Jan van Leiden, declared that the apocalypse was imminent and that the Westphalian city of Münster would be the seat of the New Jerusalem. Melchiorites flooded the town, the Catholic Prince-Bishop fled, and on 10 February 1534 the Anabaptists seized the city. Matthys ruled it as prophet-king. The Bishop raised an army and laid siege. By Easter Matthys announced he had received a vision; he walked out of the gates against the besiegers, and was instantly cut down. Jan van Leiden then took power, declared himself King of New Jerusalem, made every offence except adultery a capital crime (he had been caught with Matthys's widow), and imposed compulsory polygamy on the city. A small revolt on 31 August 1534 was crushed and the participants beheaded. When word reached the Bishop's camp, his troops rushed the gates - and 3,000 of them died in the assault.

Inside the walls famine set in. The few hundred who managed to escape were killed by the besieging army. When van Leiden's prophecy that the siege would end by Easter 1535 failed to come true he lost the room. Someone opened a gate from inside; the Bishop's soldiers poured in and massacred almost the entire population. Jan van Leiden was captured, tortured to death with red-hot iron tongs, and his body hung from an iron cage on the tower of St Lambert's Church in Münster. The cage is still there today.

Despite officially banning money, the Anabaptist regime did strike a small series of silver coins for trade with the outside world. Almost none ever circulated, and almost every example was destroyed by the Bishop's forces after the city fell. The dies, however, were preserved in the city archives. In the 1640s, while delegates were negotiating the Peace of Westphalia in Münster and Osnabrück to end the Thirty Years' War, the city used those original dies to strike a small number of restrikes - silver souvenirs given as diplomatic gifts to the negotiators.

This is one of those 1640s restrikes, struck from the original 1534 dies of the 2 thaler. The obverse carries a central Gothic cartouche reading THO MVNSTER above the date 1534, surrounded by concentric circular legends in Low German naming the Word of God and the city. The reverse carries the central inscription DAT WORT IS FLEISCH GEWORDEN VN WANET IN VNS - "The Word is become flesh and dwells among us" - John 1:14, the theological centerpiece of the Anabaptist Kingdom's self-image. PCGS AU 55 preserves the dense Gothic legends crisply across both sides on heavy, full-bodied silver. There is almost no other 16th-century revolutionary regime whose own coinage survives at all - and almost none with this kind of ideological self-declaration stamped directly into the metal.