the charles and joanna project
Objectives
History Numismatics
The Charles & Joanna Project
A Historical and Numismatic Study
AN ENTERPRISE OF DISCOVERY
The Charles and Joanna Project is part of a long-term study of the earliest silver coinage of the New World. Its counterpart, termed The Philip II Project when still in its research phase, is being written for publication in monograph form and explores the evolution of this coinage in similar fashion, from its inception to the end of the sixteenth century. Together these studies will be offered as a constructive contribution to our understanding of these coins, an embarkation point which future studies will improve, correct, and surpass, in the ongoing enterprise to discover how we should map these coins, and what these witnesses of a vanished past can tell us.
WHERE IT STARTED:
TERRA INCOGNITA
Until this project, the study of history had no peer as the most intriguing and enlightening discipline I had ever been associated with; that changed abruptly in the early 1990s, while studying Late Medieval Spain during post-graduate work. By chance I happened upon a reference to coins of the Spanish kings, in an essay charting the voyages of exploration launched by European kingdoms throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From the illustration accompanying the reference, I recognized instantly that the coins had high relevance to royal insignia depicted in period illustrations and manuscripts. They were unlike any of the Roman and Judean coinages illustrated in required readings on the Roman Empire. I was accustomed to drawing on documents for primary source material. These metallic documents were new to me. My coursework relevant to the history of Spain had neglected this evidence.
The coins were silver and gold. In my spare time I began to research them, and found the coins fascinating for their iconography and its recombinations. Bristling with towers of power, the castles rising from their surfaces captured my curiosity. What did these citadels signify? Majestic lions — cunning and dangerous — accompanied them, appearing as though guardians of the fortresses with which they were paired. How was this king of predators to be read? This was a semantic system far removed from (and of greater historical depth than) the palaeographic morphology I was familiar with. Here was a new language I could learn, entirely visual and equally cryptic.
Later on as I read further, I turned a page to behold the silver reales of the Mexico mint empowered in 1535. They were minted for decades. None of the coins were dated. On their surfaces, the designs unfurled with a multitude of intricate variations. The orthography of the Late Medieval Latin inscriptions encircling them appeared fragmentary, unusual, at times syntactically ambiguous. What was the meaning attached to all of this? I wondered. The entire sixteenth century New World silver series presented the most challenging collection of mysteries I had ever encountered.
Altogether this was a vast jigsaw puzzle, last seen in its entirety over four hundred years ago, for which no complete picture has survived. There was no foolproof guide to how it should be put together. Thousands of pieces were strewn all across the earth: some lost, some recently found, some damaged, some safe and sound, some missing, some where they should not be...
In what sequence were these produced?
All of this was irresistible: an unexpected and unknown frontier in my learning had emerged — a good share of it still unmapped and unexplored. As I began to learn the ropes in this unfamiliar world, I fell in with three master mariners willing to train me in sailing numismatic seas, and the craft of navigating Scylla and Charybdis. Armed with this new discipline, it seemed to me that a historical and numismatic approach could serve to unlock the sequence and meaning I sought to understand.
OBJECTIVES
When this research is concluded, the published monograph will offer an interpretation of the chronology and iconography of the coins, consistent with their sixteenth century matrix.
Videmus nunc in aenigmate
una enigma de historia
un imperio en el que el sol nunca se ponia
