GERMANY, AACHEN 12 heller 1767 IK

Description

Aachen is a city in far northwestern Germany. There is a cathedral and a university. There were Neolithic settlements. There are hot springs there. The Romans built a spa. You’d travel for a couple of weeks to get to the medicinal waters. The spa was destroyed during the barbarian invasions. In Carolingian times the spa was rebuilt and the town was attached to Cologne. In the days of the Holy Roman Empire it was a Free Imperial City. Napoleon took it, then lost it to Prussia after his fall.

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.