The Jonathan K. Kern Collection of Siege Coinage

CNG 108, Lot: 1005. Estimate $500. Sold for $1600. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

OTTOMAN WARS IN EUROPE (Türkenkriege), Austria. Vienna. Besieged by the Ottomans under Sulayman I Qanuni ('the Lawgiver'), 1529. AR 6 Kreuzer Klippe (20x22mm, 3.39 g, 6h). Dated 1529. TVRCK/BLEGERT/WIEN/15Z9 in four lines; floral ornaments at each cardinal poit / Cross pattée; in each quarter, coats-of-arms of Niederösterreich, Castile, Hungary, and Bohemia. Markl 298; Mailliet 9; Cejnek, p. 14. VF, toned.

CNG is pleased to present the Jonathan K. Kern Collection of Siege Coinage. Comprising 119 coins, one remarkable and extremely rare medal, and an original Dutch edition of Gerard Van Loon’s 1723 Beschryving der Nederlandsche historipenningen, this collection was lovingly assembled by Jon with an eye to acquiring examples of these emergency issues, struck during a tumultuous period in Europe’s history. No stranger to the field, his broad numismatic knowledge has helped others in building their collections. At the same time, he has collected for himself coins that have a strong academic and historical appeal.

As for Jon’s numismatic backstory and reasons for collecting, no one could tell that story better than himself:

In the early 1970s I was attending the University of Kentucky in the honors program as an undergraduate geology major. Coins were rapidly becoming much more fun than rocks. By working flea markets and coin shows on weekends, I came to the conclusion that I could earn $2,000 a year doing my hobby as a business, and I could survive on this income. Frugal living was acceptable to me if I could be my own boss. I dropped out of my second semester of my sophomore year to get married and do coins full time. I apprenticed under the expert coin repair master Paul Stockton for 3 months. We were mutually compensated since I was running his over the counter Pioneer Coin Shop for $1.00 an hour for his 35 hour Monday thru Friday business week.

The importance of a college degree could still not be overlooked and I probably knew that if I did not get a degree soon then it would never happen. I am very grateful that academia had entered the “age of relevancy.” The honors program offered tailored majors for a bachelor’s degree if several criteria were met. All the course work for the usual Bachelor of Arts, Science or General Studies must be met. Courses related to the chosen major or independent course work at the junior and senior levels must be taken to meet the major requirements. Any independent work in the chosen major needed a faculty advisor capable of evaluating the quality of the study or research.

So I went back for my junior and senior years and got my Bachelor of Arts with a major in Numismatics in June of 1973. The normally offered courses I took in the College of Arts and Sciences related to numismatics included: art appreciation, economics, ancient, medieval and modern history, chemistry, geology, and radiochemistry. Eighty per cent of my independent study credits were devoted to my undergraduate thesis. My thesis was a thermal neutron activation analysis of silver coins from the Spanish Colonial mints Santa Fe de Bogota and Popayan in Colombia. Silver from the mining regions around these mints were largely a by product of gold mining activities. Refining materials were scarce and contemporary sources mention possible gold impurities in the silver coins. To verify these statements non-destructively, I used a high thermal neutron flux generated by a Californium-252 source to make my sample coins radioactive for a short period of time. By identifying and measuring the radiation emitted by the coins, the gold impurities could be quantified. Many of the samples – ½,1, and 2 reales coins – had a 5% gold content, substantially raising the intrinsic value over face value. This could easily have contributed to the numismatic scarcity of the silver coins from these mints during this period.

My chemistry professor, Dr. William Ehmann, evaluated the radiochemistry scholarship, and my history professor and honors advisor, Dr. John Scarborough, evaluated my numismatic research. I was fortunate that Dr. Scarborough was interested in the archaeological uses of numismatics and appreciated research into this specialized field.

In 1961 and 1962, my family lived in Bandung, Indonesia, on the island of Java. My father was teaching physics at the university as part of an academic exchange program. To paraphrase Neil Sowards, a missionary friend of mine who taught me a lot about foreign and ancient coins, ‘the poor here wish they could be poor in the United States.’ The street peddlers would bring their varied local arts, crafts, foods, and miscellany around the academic neighborhood hoping to make a sale. I was immediately fascinated with the obsolete Dutch East Indies coin, which were for sale for a few cents each. Here were coins with holes in the middle, square coins (oriented like a baseball diamond), coins with scalloped edges, and cut bars of copper called bonks. Half cents, 2 ½ cents, 1/10 gulden, ¼ gulden, ½,1, and 2 stuiver coppers, duits, 2 1/2 guilder and 3 guilder coins were all exciting to me. Here were coins with the Dutch language and Latin letters on one side but with Arabic script and Malay on the revese. Some of these were 200 years old! Some had portraits of a queen, shown in 4 different stages of life. And others were her father, and grandfather. So many different ways to collect coins!

Arriving back in Lexington, I immediately joined the Bluegrass Coin Club, and was the only collector of foreign coins, and the only collector who didn’t care about 1950-D nickels and 1909-S VDB Lincolns. I was excited when club member Brooking Gex sold me my first Dutch 20 guilder for $9 and gave me 3 months to pay.

In the early 1970s, when I started doing New York city coin shows, I visited the American Numismatic Society. On display were cases of strangely shaped Dutch siege coins, focusing on the Protestant rebellion against the Catholic Spanish overlords known as the Eighty Years’ War. Fast forward 40 years and the Archer Huntington collection, which had been loaned to the ANS actually came up for sale! I had resources at the time, and as a collector I simply had to own them. Now in phased retirement, it is time to pass on the history and enjoyment of these many quirky emergency coinages that have given me so much pleasure.

A Note from the Cataloger

It has been both a pleasure and a challenge to catalog the Jonathan K. Kern Collection of Siege Coins. Covering a tumultuous period in the history of early modern Europe, with two centuries of almost continuous religious and political warfare, this collection reflects the importance of sieges in the warfare of this period and a tangible reminder of the human lives involved. Siege warfare can trace its historic origins to the earliest human settlements. During the Middle Ages, when cities became fortified citadels, military strategy focused on advancing through a territory and winning its objectives through a series of sieges. By the fourteenth century, when cannons were introduced, cities began to design more modern and complicated fortifications. The artist and polymath Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) spent a great deal of energy designing novel military technologies, which included designs for defensive fortifications. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fortification design and siege tactics advanced rapidly in a kind of arms race. The result of all of this was that siege warfare remained a fundamental part of early modern warfare.

As one can see from this collection, the European wars of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries were often interwoven with one another, The largest number of coins here come from the Dutch Revolt (1568-1648). Having its beginnings in the nascent religious wars of the sixteenth century, it soon became a war of national survival. Even after the Dutch achieved their officially recognized independence with the Treaty of Westphalia, that independence still continued to be challenged, especially by Louis XIV. I found this section to be of special interest, for as a person of Dutch heritage. It is quite possible that some of my ancestors held these coins as they struggled to survive some of these sieges, or the battles that raged back and forth over the land.

Please note that a number of these coins, especially those of the Dutch revolt are made of pewter, tin, and lead. Also, one issue of Amsterdam is engraved on the reverse with an image of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of artillerymen on the reverse. These pieces served as mementos, either to the men who served and survived, as may have been the case with the Saint Barbara issue, or to the subsequent generations who wished to remember the heroic deeds of their ancestors.

Jon clearly enjoyed forming this collection and will take pleasure from it being dispersed among new collectors who will be eager to learn their stories in more detail. For me, apart from the occasional missteps of other collectors or graders, this was a pleasure for me, and I hope to add one of these important coins to my collection.

I thank Jeroen De Wilde for his assistance and personal notes which contributed to this catalog. CNG thanks Numismatica Genevensis SA for the use of their images of those coins which have since been encapsulated.

D. Scott VanHorn

The Ottoman wars in Europe were a series of military conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and various European states from the thirteenth century to World War I. The earliest of these wars were the Byzantine–Ottoman wars of the 13th century, followed by the Bulgarian–Ottoman wars, and the Serbian–Ottoman wars of the 14th century. This period saw extensive Ottoman expansion into the Balkans. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottomans push further into Central Europe, culminating in the Siege of Vienna in 1529.

The Ottoman–Venetian Wars lasted from 1423 to 1718. During this time, many formerly Venetian trading centers fell, including Negroponte in 1470, and Famagusta (Cyprus) in 1571. The defeat of the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the fall of Candia (Crete) in 1669, the Venetian reconquest of Morea (Peloponnese) in the 1680s, checked the Ottoman advance for a short while, but Morea’s loss again in 1715 left Corfu the only Greek island not conquered by the Ottomans.

In the late seventeenth century, European powers began to consolidate against the Ottomans and formed the Holy League, reversing a number of Ottoman gains during the Great Turkish War of 1683–99. Nevertheless, Ottoman armies were able to hold off European armies until the second half of the eighteenth century. The Serbian (1804–1817) and Greek (1821–1832) insurrections demonstrated the weakening of Ottoman power in the Balkans. The final retreat of Ottoman rule came with the First Balkan War (1912–1913), followed by the World War I, which brought about the collapse of the empire as a whole.

The siege of Vienna in 1529 was the first of two sieges by the Ottoman Turks against the city (the later coming in 1683). After a successful military campaign in Hungary, the Ottoman Sultan Sulayman I advanced on Vienna with an enormous force in the fall of 1529. However, due to poor weather and a strong defense of the city, he was soon forced to abandon the siege. This event was a high-water mark for the Turkish expansion. For more than a century afterwards, the Ottoman Empire would not have the power to threaten central Europe.