ITALY NAPLES and SICILY 6 tornese year 7 (1799)

Description

The Neapolitan Republic (also called the Parthenopean Republic in this case), was established in January, 1799 when French revolutionary troops drove out the Neapolitan King Ferdinand IV. The King returned in June and drove out the French.

Naples and Sicily had been entwined in dynastic and political affairs since the 12th century. They broke apart in the 13th century. Spain owned both for a while, then both became independent in the 18th century, though both were ruled by junior members of the Spanish royal family. After Napoleon the two kingdoms were combined into one, called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which endured as the largest Italian state until Unification.

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.