BELGIUM, 20 francs, 1954

DescriptionBeautiful surfaces on this coin.Nice portrait of Mercury on the obverse.Belgium and the Netherlands are the “Low Countries.” During the wars of the Reformation what is now Belgium stayed with the Catholic Holy Roman Empire, while the Protestant Netherlands broke away. After the Napoleonic wars Belgium was held by Netherlands for a few decades but the relationship was bad and Belgium broke away.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.