1643 AR Thaler (Glockenthaler / 'Bell Thaler')

The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) began with the Second Defenestration of Prague: in May 1618 Bohemian Protestant nobles threw the Catholic regents of the new Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II out of a third-storey window of Prague Castle into the moat below. What started as a Bohemian religious revolt escalated through four distinct phases - Bohemian, Danish, Swedish, and French - and dragged in nearly every major power in Europe: Bohemia, the Palatinate, the Dutch Republic, Denmark, Sweden, and eventually France against the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, and Spain. France, though Catholic, fought with the Protestant powers in the final phase to prevent Habsburg encirclement. By the war's end roughly 8 million people were dead - approximately 1.4 percent of Europe's total population. (For comparison, the First World War, with industrial weaponry, killed about 1.7 percent.)

The Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel sat in Lower Saxony directly across the line of march of every major army of the war. The capital, Wolfenbüttel, was a star-shaped Renaissance fortress city - one of the strongest in north Germany - and consequently a prize. In 1634 Imperial troops occupied it. For nine years the rightful Duke, Augustus the Younger - the great bibliophile and founder of the Herzog August Bibliothek - was kept out of his own capital. The city sat under foreign garrison while plague, requisitions, and starvation reduced the surrounding country.

In summer 1643 a combined Swedish and French army under Marshal Lennart Torstensson finally compelled the Imperial garrison to evacuate. On 19 September 1643 Augustus the Younger entered Wolfenbüttel as its Duke for the first time. To mark the moment he commissioned a remarkable series of seven medallic thaler types - the Glockenthaler ("Bell Thalers") - struck successively from 1643 onward, each with a slightly different bell-themed reverse, all proclaiming the providential liberation of the city. The seventh and final type, struck in 1643 (Davenport-6375C), is the present coin.

The reverse iconography is among the most beautiful of the entire German baroque. A great bell hangs from a wooden bell-frame; three hands reach out of clouds to ring it; sunbeams break through above, and the Hebrew Tetragrammaton יהוה ("YHWH") shines in glory; in the distance, the freed star-fortress of Wolfenbüttel itself is depicted in topographical detail. A scroll across the bell carries the abbreviated NUPLC EX 9 - "Nun Publice Ex Nono" - "now publicly, after the ninth [year]." The circular legend, with a tiny five-petaled flower separating each of the four words (the distinguishing feature of the seventh type, Davenport's variant 6375C), reads TANDEM PATIENTIA VICTRIX - "At last, Patience is the Victor." The obverse shows the great Brunswick arms beneath five plumed helmets - the heraldic statement of the restored Duke. The Peace of Westphalia, ending the war, would follow five years later in 1648.

The complete seven-type Bell Thaler series is one of the most sought-after sets in all of German numismatics, and individual examples - especially in problem-free collector grade - are difficult to acquire. This Davenport-6375C in NGC XF-45 is a strong, fully struck example with original cabinet toning.