1634 5 Thaler

The Thirty Years' War began in 1618 when the newly crowned Catholic King of Bohemia, Ferdinand II, sent representatives to Prague to force the city back to Catholicism. The citizens responded by throwing the representatives out a window into a pile of manure - the Second Defenestration of Prague - and the war was on.

What began as a fight over religious freedom in the German lands rapidly metastasized into a continental geopolitical struggle. Gustavus II Adolphus, King of Sweden, intervened in 1630 on the Protestant side and proved himself one of the great captains of the age - until he was killed leading a cavalry charge at the Battle of Lützen in November 1632.

His body arrived at Wolgast in January 1633. As the royal corpse was prepared for procession to the Baltic coast and transport home to Sweden, the city mint briefly reopened to strike a series of large commemorative thalers and multiple-thalers honoring the fallen king. The silver, by tradition, was repurposed from Queen Maria Eleonora's own sink and water jug.

The obverse shows Gustavus Adolphus enthroned in the Chariot of Triumph, drawn by three Pegasi and crowned by the personifications of Religion and Justice. Above runs the legend ET VITA ET MORTE TRIUMPHO - "In life as in death I triumph" - while the wheels of the chariot crush the Devil beneath them, a thinly veiled stand-in for the Pope.

The reverse depicts the King lying in full ornament at the edge of the battlefield, his soul borne by two angels toward the Hebrew Tetragrammaton (the old Hebrew name of God) within blazing rays, surrounded by the phrase EUGE SERVE FIDELIS - "Well done, faithful servant." In the background, the Swedish army routs the Catholic forces beneath the legend VEL MORTUUM FUGIUNT - "They flee before him, even in death." Below, the dates record his birth (9 December 1594) and his glorious death (6 November 1632).

This is one of the great Baroque funerary medals of European numismatics - a 5 Thaler scaled to the dignity of a Protestant martyr-king.