AUSTRIA Maria Theresia 1 pfennig 1764 A

Description

Maria Theresa had been set up to take power in the Holy Roman Empire when her father, Emperor Charles VI. There was a lack of general agreement that that was a good idea. Neighbors like Prussia took advantage of the situation. She secured her power and ruled for four decades. She put through some military and agricultural reforms in the standard autocratic form by which things were done back then. She was pretty popular at the time with the general populace.

The Holy Roman Empire developed after the breakup of the Carolingian Empire. The Central European political entity that bore that name was begun by German Emperor Otto I, in 962 AD. It became the possession, more or less, of the Habsburg family until 1806, when Napoleon dissolved it.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of anarchy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.