ITALY KINGDOM OF NAPOLEON silver 10 soldi 1812 V

Description

Napoleon conquered northern Italy in 1802 and established a republic. In 1805 he made himself “King of Italy.” The lands in question included some territories now in Albania and Croatia. The Kingdom of Italy became defunct with the defeat of Naploleon in 1814. Austria took over most of northern Italy.

After the devolution of the Western Roman Empire into a German kingdom the Italian peninsula went through about 1800 years of disunity and foreign conquest before the War of Unification in the 1860s.

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.