ITALY NAPLES and SICILY silver 120 grani 1834
$110.00
ITALY, NAPLES and SICILY (Two Sicilies), Ferdinand II, 1830-59, 120 grani, 1834, silver, 0.7373 ozT, KM309, edge bump, VF
Out of stock
Description
Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily) became King on the death of his father, Francis I. The Two Sicilies were ruled as a conservative police state. The various uprisings in Europe in 1848 forced him to grant a constitution, but the various interests could not come to terms. Ferdinand continued to rule as an absolute monarch. Sicily attempted to withdraw from the Kingdom, Ferdinand sent troops. he won the war. In later years his rough and rowdy governing system resulted in political isolation, which facilitated the invasion of the Kingdom by the King of Sardinia, whose King, Victor Emanuel II, completed the unification of Italy in 1861.
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.
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.
