ITALY SARDINIA silver 1 lira 1835 P

Description

Charles Albert became King of Sardinia when his cousin, Charles Felix, died without an heir. He went to war with Austria in an attempt to “liberate” northern Italy, but was defeated when his allies the Papacy and the Two Sicilies both backed out of the confrontation. He ruled as an absolutist, but granted a constitution during the upheavals of 1848. He went against the Austrians again in 1849, was defeated, and died a few months later.

Sardinia is the second largest Italian island. The Kings of Sardinia went on to become the Kings of 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.