Medieval coin experts needed...

I'm not any good with Medieval era coins, can someone give me some
detailed information on this coin??
I am thinking Hungary, one of the Sigismund denar coins
I don't know if the numbers are representative of a 1616 date???

 

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Has he got glasses on?

 

I think your photo on the right is upside down. It’s a Polish coin of Sigismund III, shown here.

 

Eyeglasses, though crude, have supposedly been around since the 13th century, so he could be wearing glasses (though he probably isn't ).

As this site (among many others) says:
"Although the exact date is in dispute, it is generally agreed upon that the first pair of corrective eyeglasses was invented in Italy sometime between 1268 and 1300. These were basically two reading stones (magnifying glasses) connected with a hinge balanced on the bridge of the nose."

Ben Franklin invented bifocals in the 18th century.

 

Hi, the 17th century isn't medieval, so this coin is post medieval

 

Some historians take the Middle Ages to the treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. That war started off as a war of religion, Medieval motive, and ended as a war of incipient nation states and nationalism, modern concept. If this coin is dated 1616 it was coined just before the defenestration of Prague and just makes it into the last period before the end of the Middle Ages.

 

The defenestration of Prague. Now that was a spectacle!!

 

definition from Encyclopaedia Britannica: Middle Ages, the period in European history from the collapse of Roman civilization in the 5th century CE to the period of the Renaissance (variously interpreted as beginning in the 13th, 14th, or 15th century, depending on the region of Europe and other factors).

 

Of course the Britannica would think that. Had England been involved in that war they might have seen it differently. Seriously, there is an argument that the Middle Ages extended from Constantine for an early date to the end of the Thirty Years War. When I taught European History in school I told my students that giving a terminal date for the Middle Ages and the beginning of early modern European history is not fixed in stone and most text books pick things like the beginning of the Renaissance (which began over Europe anywhere from the 14th to the 16th Centuries as there is no one event from that period that marks its beginning), the discovery of the New World, the formation of the nation state and the collapse of feudalism (another moving target date) or the outbreak of the Reformation, which has the virtue of being commonly accepted as starting with Luther's Ninety-five Theses. In the area of Numismatics I don't know that there is a fixed date for collecting periods. If one considers collecting Byzantine coins, the Britannica's definition would put Justinian's coins in the Middle Ages but I know any number of collectors of ancient coins who consider his coinage as part of ancient coins. I have no problem with assigning Justinian to either a medieval or ancient designation nor a coin of 1616 to late medieval or early modern coinage. Of course if you were to base this definition on what each of those people of each of those periods would have said about their coinage, they all would have described their coinage as "modern" coinage.

 

Yes, spectacle for sure, but thanks to a strategically and serendipitously placed pile of dung, not a fatal one.

 

This is all opinion, of course, and which events or factors in a temporal sense your breaking-out of sub-eras can be used to highlight is extremely variable - highly dependent also on the specific subject under consideration. Rounding-off Gutenberg's "invention" of movable type and the beginning of common access to books and knowledge to ~1450 works for me as a functional end of the Medieval period - particularly because it's also contemporaneous with the fall of Constantinople. Both of these highly seminal events occurred nearly exactly a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
This millennium can be variously broken into sub-eras. Profoundly 'dark' ages - Early medieval - Crusades - High medieval - Pre-plague and Post-plague - Late medieval, etc. Depending on what part of the medieval era you're studying, the starting and end dates for these periods may be relatively fluid without losing this structure completely.
15th-17th centuries - corresponding to the last of the era of hand-striking - usefully serves as an "Early modern" era, particularly for the numismatist. The introduction and widespread use of various forms of machine minting becomes really widespread and common around the later 17th and beginning of the 18th century.
Calling 1648 (a date by which many European coins - including the OP's - were milled) "medieval" seems like a real stretch to me. It's certainly "Modern", perhaps "Early modern" if you prefer - but break-out the overall period into whatever "chunks" you please, whichever work most accurately to align with your specific eras of study.

 

Thank you so much for finding this for me, just what I needed!

Now I'll let the conversation continue to devolve into who is more correct
about when and where the Medieval period ended and what came next...
Interesting???¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

I learned a new word, thanks.

 

I am not trying to be difficult or obtuse on this but for coin collecting purposes and whether a coin dated 1616 should or should not be labelled modern or medieval, if the criterion were the minting method, hammered or milled, what percentage of European coins minted that year used the milling method and what percentage were hammered?

 

Good point. Some people just like to argue and think they right. We are in this for fun, and the learning experience. No need to debate how many mint masters can dance on the head of a pin.

 

To take the last point first, facts matter.

We all live and learn. That is a big reason for participating here for me. Myself, I would have drawn the line at 1453 and the Fall of Constantinople for the end of the Middle Ages. That said, I can also stop and reconsider based on the argument that the end of the Thirty Years' War signaled important changes in the common worldview. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were the foundations of modern society, at least in the European theater.

My degrees are in social science (BS, MA) and I tell my conservative comrades who are engineers that human beings are more complicated than billiard balls. So, the descriptions of human action are more involved, more subtle, more nuanced. Right and wrong exist. It just takes more words to describe them. "F=ma" won't say enough about the most important aspect of being humans in societies.

We like nice bright lines. September 4, 476, Roman Empire ends, Dark Ages begin. Christmas Day 800, Charlemagne crowned, Dark Age ends; Middle Age begins. But as I noted above, it is not so clear. No one saw the coronation of Charlemagne on CNN, turned to his neighbor and said, "Hey, look, the Dark Age is over." If anything marks the start of a new way of looking at the world, it could be Copernicus, or Galileo, or surely Newton. But that would ignore the radical shift in art of the Renaissance with its vivid colors and flowing human forms. Dante's Divina Commedia was written in vernacular Italian, not Latin. Latin had been changing. It was a living language even then. People who used new words and new phrasings knew that they were not imitating Cicero. And, even in 1832, Carl Friedrich Gauss published in Latin, not German. Nonetheless, I would acknowledge Luther's Bible as the first work in modern German. Therefore, it was a landmark event in the end of the Middle Ages for more than its impact on religion.

So, as above, I can accept your suggestion about the Treaty of Westphalia.

On the EB, see my comments on the Spanish Armada (and the Battle of Lake Erie which is commemorated on US national bank notes). That being as it may, I wrote ten or so articles for The Celator. There, it was commonly accepted that "ancient" ended with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. They published articles about Medieval coinage and collectibles from other cultures as well. But that date for those writers and editors was pretty much set in stone.

That being as it may, see also, the Celator article, "What (if anything) is a Byzantine?" by Clifton R. Fox
http://www.romanity.org/htm/fox.01.en.what_if_anything_is_a_byzantine.01.htm
Revised 3/29/96. The original version of this article appeared in the Celator [Volume 10, Number 3: March 1996]. Portions are also quoted in the book Ancient Coin Collecting by Wayne G. Sayles, published [June 1996] by Krause Publications.

Right. Well, we speak, also, of the Caroliginian Renaissance, the Aquitaine Renaissance as the first false dawns of the coming new age. You would have to ask a Russian serf or an American slave of 1850 if the Middle Ages were actually over.

I wrote up my definitions for the modern era for my blog here:
https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-chronology-of-recent-historical.html

Well, that is interesting. I had not considered that. Milled coinage would be the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Nothing else so completely put an end the Middle Ages (Russia and the American South excepted). And our focus here is on the coinage. Also, at that same time in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we see the first wide acceptance of paper money. Yes, it had precursors with the Chinese. And it is a curious fact that bills of account in cuneiform on clay preceded coinage by thousands of years. But modern paper money is an artifact of true capitalism. Earlier societies had merchants, of course, but the ability to calculate risk and then buy and sell it was a turning point.

 

What is sad, we are ALL so Western-Centric.

We seem to consistently FORGET about India and especially CHINA for their Histories. NONE of above dates mean anything for more than HALF of the World's population, let alone all of the Human innovations that happened in China WELL before the Western Histories.

Once you start reading some Chinese History, their innovations, their approaches to things, you will "reset" some of the aspects of the Western perspective of thinking. I do not focus as much on their modern history from the 1600's forward.

Amazing Human Civilization.


Robert Temple, The Genius of China.

 

That is why despite all the "expertise" of sociologists, Historians philosophers,criminologists,anthropologists, politics and international studies, psychology etc nothing fundamentally changes and we are all experts and don't need a piece of paper to tell us that we are! As the French say...Plus ca change....used to express resigned acknowledgement of the fundamental immutability of human nature and institutions.
Meanwhile must set fire to a 5G mast and bow down before our lizard masters according to my leader Mr Icke!

 

Oh, no! Please, let's not bring up that kind of subject again -- it risks reviving a certain thread, and inspiring a certain person to post here again!

 

That's me. Time to unwatch this thread, too much arguing going on.