ITALY PISA silver half giulio (grosso) 1721
$50.00
ITALY, PISA, Cosimo III, 1670-1723, half giulio (grosso), 1721, silver, KM40, aVF/F
Out of stock
Description
Cosimi III di Medici was Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1670 to 1723. He inherited a state in disrepair. His attempts to remedy the situation were generally unsuccessful. He spent much of his time on various projects of religious repression. One of his sons suceeded him in 1723, but died without an heir and the House of Medici became extinct.
Pisa is a city in Tuscany, situated at the mouth of the Arno river on the Ligurian sea. It was active in Etruscan times, flourished under the Romans. In medieval times it became one of the four “maritime republics.” It fought the Muslims in Sicily and fought wars with various other Italian States, notably Genoa. It established colonies in Africa, Sicily, and Greece, and large Pisan communites in Constantinople and the Levant. The on and off war with Genoa ended with a Genoese victory in 1290. Pisa declined in political influence, then silting of the port cut it off from the sea. It became a prize of other actors. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 it was given to Tuscany.
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.
