1796 32 Shilling - Lubeck

elverno

A nice collector's coin, not super-high quality but a relatively tough city to get:

theboz11

I have never seen one,, nice catch

Darkhorse

One of the wonderful things about collecting German coins is that you can obtain a coin native to major cities that have circulated in the past. Karlsruhe is a small city yet it had its own copper coins, I've been to Westfalen and of course there's the Westfalen inflation pieces. In Stuttgart I could've picked up a cool medal of the schloss there (didn't because I thought the white metal was a little iffy). I'm eyeing a Weimar piece celebrating the Rhineland as well.

Lubeck has a particularly cool crest, I would love to pick up one of its Kaiserreich 3 or 2 mark variations. They're pricey though.

farthing

Very nice!

spoon

Looks like some awesome quality to me!! Cool coin

Forgive my ignorance, Vern, but what went on in the Lubeck area during Nappy's years? Did he go into that area?

elverno

Actually spoon I don't know that much myself. Not much more than in Krause...

Lubeck was a free city, sort of an independent like Danzig and was occupied by the French during the wars. When the tide rolled west in 1813 Lubeck went back to being a free city for a few more years.

Napoleon was annoyed by the German proliferation of independent cities, duchies, principalities, etc. It probably offended his fairly tidy mind and he went about systematically reducing the number over the years to a mere handful. After the wars a lot of the nobility who had been booted out were in for a rude shock; the big boys weren't giving all of them back!

And the ones that did return found a very different world. Their people had gotten used to being ruled by bureaucrats. It's probably not really better than aristocrats but very few of the former feel their office was handed down from on high... Also the French Civil Code was, well French, but it was usually a lot better than the hodge-podge of laws they had before. So the Code survived a lot longer than Nappy did.

Arguably Napoleon's single-minded drive to shape the German states into something he could dominate did more for German unity than any revolution that followed. (Quite a soap-box, hunh?)

Garneteye

Thanks for the history lesson, its one of the reasons I love collecting.

Dan

coinkat

Great looking coin.

Askari

Lübecker Courantgeld isn't that easy to come by, indeed! That's a nice example!