ITALY TUSCANY 1 quattrino 1851

Description

Struck during the Austrian period.

Tuscany is now a region of western central Italy with Florence as the capital. It participated in the Etruscan culture before the Romans. The Romans founded Lucca, Siena, Pisa, and Florence. The pilgrim routes between France and Rome passed through the region, where they spent money. The money attracted more money, bringing the Medici to power. Birthplace of the Renaissance. The Medicis crafted a Duchy of Tuscany. Their line died out in 1737 and it went to the Duke of Lorraine, who was married to the Empress of Austria. It went on to join the Kingdom 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 anarchy 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.