King’s Passion

Coins were a passion of Stanisław August Poniatowski. The king financed the activity of the Mint of Warsaw and did all his best to make the company produce the most beautiful coins in Europe.

At first everything went well. In 1766 the coiners of the Mint of Warsaw minted coins of a value of 14.4 million of the then zlotys. Unfortunately, in the following years the production visibly decreased – in 1779 it dropped to almost 850,000 zlotys. The reasons were: difficulties in introducing the new currency, a huge inflow of forged coins from Prussia and an unregulated price of silver. As the chroniclers recall, despite all these obstacles, the Mint of Warsaw produced in the second half of the 17th century the most beautiful coins of the Old Continent.
Because of the difficulties a need to carry out a new monetary reform arose. The king opposed it. He required that the coins maintain a higher content of silver than the coins of neighboring powers. However, he succumbed to the pressure of the reformers. New coins were minted by the Mint of Warsaw on March 1st, 1787. Thanks to that the production in that year increased up to almost 4 million zlotys.