Germany, States: Cologne, archbishopric and electorate, 1 Schilling – ND

Description

In the year 953, Bruno, Archbishop of Colonia, was invested with the title of Duke by his brother Emperor Otto I. In this way the electorate of Colonia was born, as an emperor”s form of subtracting power to the secular nobility. In this way, since the end of the s. XII, the Archbishop of Colonia was one of the seven voters of the Emperor. In the battle of Worringen for the succession of Limburg, the archbishop was captured, having to give autonomy to the city. In fact, Colonia would be recognized as an imperial free city in 1475. There were two Protestant archbishops, the first of which, resigned after becoming, but the second Von Waldburg tried to secularize the archbishopric. This led to the appointment of a Catholic rival archbishop and the colony war, funded by the Pope, in which Bavaria”s Wittelsbach was placed as archbishop. After 5 years of wars and after having devastated the entire territory, Von Waldburg resigned and settled in Strasbourg. It was a precedent of foreign intervention in the German religion wars, which would culminate with the 30 -year war. After the invasion of the Napoelonic wars, in which Colonia joined the French Republic, the electorate was divided between several houses. The Colonia framework was the unit of measure of most German coins in the Middle Ages, from its institution in the XXI, as the inheritance of the Charlemagne pound. Thus, the frame was medium pound, and the pound was divided into 16 ounces or 20 gross of Charlemagne. If initially each state issued currency following approximate standard, the Colony frame managed to standardize the unit of measure. However, with the Guldengroschen institution as an ounce of colony (1/8 Colonia Marco), there was a first standardization in the s. XV. Subsequently in the XVI it would be unified more completely concluding with the introduction of the Reichsthaler Specie (1/9 of Colonia Marco) in 1566. In these modifications the Gulden was already defined = 240 pfennig = 60 Kreuzer and the Reichsthaler Specie = 68 Kreuzer .