LITHUANIA silver 5 litai 1936

Description

The Baltic nations are ethnically quite complicatedly diverse. Lithuania, with Poland to the south, Latvia to the north, and Russia to the east, organized as a kingdom in 1253. The kingdom became a Duchy of the Holy Roman Empire, which did not stop the Teutonic Knights from invading on the pretext that the Lithuanians were pagans, which, at that time, they were not. Lithuania beat back the Teutons, and proceeded on a course of military expansion that took them deep into Poland and Ukraine and Russia. They united with Poland in 1589. Tied to Poland, it was awarded to Russia as Poland was dismembered by its neighbors. Lithuania disappeared from politics until after World War I. It was an independent nation after World War I until it was leaned on first by Germany, then by the Soviet Union, which occupied it and incorporated it. When the USSR dissolved in 1991 Lithuania became independent again.

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.