POLAND solidus 1665

Description

John II Casimir Vasa (Jan Kazimieras Vaza, etc.) was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, Sweden too, though he didn’t have power there. He did not have luck in politics and war, losing territory to Sweden and Russia. He was forced to abdicate, and went off to France, where he lived as the guest of the French King until he died a few years later.

Poles were occupying territory in what is now the Republic of Poland from the 6th century AD. In the 10th century a pagan Polish king, Mieszko I, converted to Christianity. The Polish kingdom became powerful but was disrupted by the Mongols. A new dynasty arose in the 14th century that developed into a major European power, dominating eastern Germany and Russia for a while. Polish bigwigs bickered among themselves in the 17th century, the nation grew weak and fell apart, the pieces being picked up by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. It emerged again as an independent nation after World War I.

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.