Speciesthaler
Wikimedia disambiguation page
The Speciesthaler, also Speciestaler or Speziestaler, was a type of silver specie coin that was widespread from the 17th to the 19th century and was based on the 9-Thaler standard of the original Reichsthaler. In Scandinavian sources the term Speciesdaler is used and, in German sources, the abbreviation Species was also common.
General
The 1566 Imperial Minting Ordinance of the Holy Roman Empire stipulated that 9 Reichsthalers were to be coined a fine Cologne Mark of silver (ca. 234 g). The official Reichstaler to the 9-Thaler standard thus had a calculated fine silver content of 25.984 g.
Speciestaler was a common name in (Northern) Germany and Scandinavia in the 18th and 19th centuries. The suffix -taler goes back to the Joachimstaler Guldengroschen. The prefix Species- goes back to the Latin word species, "face" or, in Middle Latin, "bust image". Speciesthalers are mostly silver coins with an embossed head or bust image of the mint owner. There are examples here from the Dresden Mint and Leipzig Mint The Speciesthalers from Hamburg featured the city coat of arms instead of a bust.
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This entry incorporates text from “Speciesthaler” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.