SPAIN gold half escudo 1756 Madrid mint

Description

Ferdinand VI kept Spain out of major military entanglements. They called him “The Learned” and “The Just.” He build up the national finances and enlarged the army and navy. Prosperity allowed for the plentiful small denomination gold coinage.

Spanish towns were issuing coins in the days of the Greeks and Phoenicians. The united kingdom began with Ferdinand and Isabella and lasted, with interruptions, until today.

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.