1A Big Silver Coin from BohemiaSt. Joachimsthal, 1518The party at the birth of the dollarOn the Feast of Epiphany in January 1518, silver miners in the town of Konradsgrün in the mountains of northern Bohemia threw a party. Things got out of hand. By the end of the night, they had lit their empty beer kegs on fire, hauled them up on their shoulders, and run with them down the street, screaming and singing.
We know exactly where they ran, because at the time Konradsgrün had only one street. Every single one of the town’s three thousand inhabitants had arrived within the previous two years. They lived in about four hundred shacks, perched on a hillside too steep to walk without switchbacks, overlooking a valley narrow enough for a crossbow bolt to reach the other side. The street ran from a chapel, north along the mountain, to a small green—the Grün from the town’s name. At the start of the sixteenth century, the Ore Mountains that divided Bohemia and Saxony were still socked in with virgin forest. In the town’s first few years, bears would sometimes still trot over the green.
It’s possible that the miners set the kegs on fire at the end of the night because they’d run out of beer. At the time, Konradsgrün didn’t yet have a license for its own brewery, and beer had to be hauled in from Schlackenwerth, a town about an hour’s walk away. Schlackenwerth was also the seat of Stephan Schlick, a minor Bohemian nobleman who had claimed the earth around the brand-new mines. The land wasn’t his to claim. He shared the title of count with several other members of his extended family; they all had a claim to the same land. But Stephan Schlick had just brazenly decided he should be lord of the valley, then started acting as if he were.
We do have a good idea of what the party in January 1518 was about. I have found two mentions of the event. One says only that a new captain of the mountain, Heinrich von Könneritz, was “festively installed” on the Feast of Epiphany in 1518. The other describes a christening party, to give the town a new name.
The party marked a temporary victory for the miners in a long fight with Schlick. His title as lord was questionable to begin with, but he was also just bad at it. In the summer of 1517, the miners at Konradsgrün had downed tools over work conditions and threatened to walk out of the valley. Schlick had agreed to a list of demands, among them a requirement to pay the miners with higher-quality silver coins. The miners had also demanded that they give the town a new name of their choosing. The morning after the party, the miners woke up, hungover and likely singed, in a town called St. Joachimsthal—the Valley of Saint Joachim. The silver coins that came out of the valley would become known as joachimsthaler, and then simply thaler or taler.
By the early 1530s, the kingdom of Sweden would begin producing a big silver coin called a jockumsdaler, and the kingdom of Denmark would mint a Jochemdaler, both copies of the same big silver coins that came out of St. Joachimsthal and both named for the town itself, the start of a centuries-long process of copies of copies of copies of the same silver coin. Today the U.S. Mint still makes a coin it calls a silver dollar, with almost the exact same dimensions as the ones that came out of the mint at Joachimsthal. If you were ever given a silver dollar as a child for your birthday, you held in your little palm a direct descendant of that christening party in the mountains in Bohemia in 1518.
The mining town of St. Joachimsthal often shows up in histories of the dollar as the origin of the name itself. Over time the German word taler became, in English, “dollar.” But those histories suggest that what happened at the actual mine in the valley is now irrelevant. They argue that a domestic currency simply became international: Count Schlick had so much silver that the coins of his own realm spread beyond his own borders. But nothing in that sentence about Schlick is really true. Stephan was only one of several Counts Schlick, an ambitious huckster without a clear claim on anything in the valley. In the sixteenth century, St. Joachimsthal was the single most productive silver mine in Europe, but it wasn’t completely out of proportion with the other mines. The big silver joachimsthaler coins that came out of the valley were never meant as local currency. They were far more useful for trade across the Baltic than they were for making payments in a tiny corner of Bohemia.
Stephan Schlick never even wanted to make coins. He just wanted to buy silver cheaply in a place that called him lord, then sell it as silver bars at a profit to bankers in Nuremberg. But his scheme fell apart. By the 1520s, other Bohemian lords and even his own family caught up with Stephan Schlick and forced him to start minting the coins that eventually became the world’s currency. We now think of coins as just money, but in a silver-producing kingdom like Bohemia a mint was also a form of control, a way to count all the silver, stamp it, and tax it. During his short life Schlick was also constantly at the mercy of his miners, who walked out of the mines several times because they couldn’t get paid in the same good silver they were pulling out of the ground. That is, the man who set in motion the money we now call the dollar didn’t even make reliable money for the people who lived in his valley. The joachimsthaler wasn’t Stephan Schlick’s money, or even Bohemia’s money. The dollar was an accident.
The Feast of Epiphany in that one valley in northern Bohemia in 1518—with the flaming beer keg runs from the chapel to the green—marked the beginning of what we today call the dollar. It also marked only a temporary peace in the fight over whose dollar it would be. I have on my desk a copy in silver of one of those first joachimsthaler coins. When I drop it, it doesn’t jingle. It clanks. It has heft. It’s a coin for lords and merchants; it’s not the kind of thing a carpenter would pull out of a pocket to pay for a loaf of bread. That world with its clanking, physical coins is not so different from our own, with its banks and credit cards and storefronts for check cashing. Today some kinds of dollars work for the wealthy, for investors, and for people who ship goods from one continent to another. Some kinds of dollars work for everyone else. Stephan Schlick had a hard time making the right mix of silver bars and big and little coins to make everyone happy: his miners, the investors at his mines, his bankers, and the other lords of Bohemia. That problem never went away. It’s still with us now.
A silver find in the forestUntil 1512, Konradsgrün had been a ruin, a collection of abandoned houses and a forge on the valley floor, with trees growing up through the frames. That year two men walked up from the valley floor, began to dig, and discovered something so overwhelming that they covered their holes back up with slag and immediately left. One of the men was local, from Schlackenwerth—Stephan Schlick’s home county, the place where the beer kegs came from for that party. The other came from a silver-mining town in Saxony, and probably had some understanding of mining law. The two might have been able to establish a legal claim to the mine and sell the silver they’d found, but together they weren’t able to get past any of the basic hurdles of silver prospecting. Silver under the ground doesn’t automatically become silver in your hand. Even in the sixteenth century, someone had to pay for skilled miners and huge machines to dig up ore, refine it into silver on the surface, and sell it into an international market. There’s no silver without investors to pay for silver mining. And what investors wanted determined where the silver went.
In 1515, Stephan Schlick was taking the baths at Karlsbad, about a three-hour walk from the mouth of the valley, when he heard about what the two men had found. By the next spring, he had invited a small group of investors from Saxon mines south for a visit. They met with Schlick at Karlsbad, where he dressed them up as a hunting party and rode with them up the valley floor to check out the slag heap. Schlick’s visitors began production immediately. By the last two quarters of 1516, they were pulling ore out of the ground and refining it into silver.
Joachimsthal is now called Jáchymov, in what is now Czechia. Karlsbad is still a spa town, but also now goes by its Czech name, Karlovy Vary. Both lie in what used to be called the Sudetenland, the part of Czechia that was majority German until the end of World War II; the names all changed after the war, when the Germans were forced to leave. In the summer of 2019, I spent a week in Karlovy Vary in the office of Jan Nedvěd, a historian at the city’s regional museum, reading through a collection of the histories of Joachimsthal, watched by Jan’s two dogs and his poster of the American punk band Fugazi.
Copyright © 2026 by Brendan Greeley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
