GERMANY HESSE-DARMSTADT 1 pfennig 1819

Description

Hesse is right in the middle of Germany. Darmstadt is a town a bit south of Frankfurt. Hesse was put in the charge of a landgrave (military commander) in the 13th century. In 1567 the domain was divided into four smaller territories. Two of them: Hesse-Cassell and Hesse-Darmstadt, survived into the 19th century.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of local autonomy 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.