TURKEY Mehmed II the Conqueror silver akche 855 AH (1451 AD)

Description

Serez is modern Siroz, now in Greece.

Mehmed (Mehmet, Muhammad) II became Sultan at the age of 12 when his father abdicated. Mehmed fought and beat the Hungarian Crusade of Janos Hunyadi, then asked his father to come back and rule for a few years. Back on the throne when his father died in 1451. Two years later he took Constantinople. He continued conquering in the Balkans, then on into Greece and Romania and beyond. Reorganized the government, established a bureaucracy, strengthened the principles of personal rule.

The earliest coins in the world were struck in Asia Minor, in modern Turkish territory. The Turks themselves arrived as nomads staring in the 9th centuriy AD. The Ottomans emerged as a dominant power in the 14th century. The Turkish Empire dissolved after World War I and a republic was established.

Middle East is, generally speaking, Morocco east to Afghanistan, Sudan in the south to Turkey in the north.

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.