AUSTRIA, HUNGARY, Ferdinand I, 20 Kreuzer 1848 KB, Kremnitz, aUNC

History

This coin was struck in the opening weeks of a revolution.

In March 1848, the news from Paris arrived in Budapest like a spark in dry grass. On the fifteenth of March, a young poet named Sándor Petőfi stood on the steps of the National Museum and read his National Song to a crowd that grew by the hour – Talpra magyar, hí a haza! – Arise, Hungarian, the homeland calls! By nightfall, a list of twelve demands had been drawn up and presented to the Habsburg governor. Within days, under the pressure of simultaneous revolution in Vienna itself, Emperor Ferdinand had conceded most of them: a Hungarian parliament, a responsible ministry, the abolition of serfdom, freedom of the press. Lajos Kossuth, the journalist and orator who had spent years in Habsburg prisons for his liberal agitation, emerged as the driving force of the new Hungarian government. It was, for a few extraordinary months, a revolution that had actually succeeded.

The mint at Kremnitz – deep in the mountain silver country of Upper Hungary, one of the oldest and most productive mints in the Habsburg world – continued striking coins through all of this upheaval, and the 20 Kreuzer of 1848 carries on its obverse the portrait of Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, the man who had just signed away more royal prerogatives in a single spring than any Habsburg had conceded in two centuries. Ferdinand was kind, gentle, and severely epileptic – so incapacitated by his condition that real power had long been exercised by Metternich and the court cabal around him. He had signed the revolutionary concessions not from conviction but because there was no one in Vienna steady enough to refuse. When Metternich himself fled the city disguised in a laundry cart, the old order effectively dissolved around its nominal head.

On the reverse, the coin carries a remarkable image – one that sets this particular 20 Kreuzer apart from the standard imperial issue struck the same year at the same mint. Rather than the double-headed Habsburg eagle of the standard type, the Hungarian revolutionary issue placed the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child at the centre, surrounded by rays of divine light, with the legend SZ. MÁRIA IST. ANNYA MAGY. OR. VÉDŐJE – Holy Mary, Mother of God, Protector of Hungary. It was a deliberate assertion of Hungarian identity, of the ancient bond between the Kingdom of Hungary and its heavenly patroness, Regnum Marianum – the Kingdom of Mary – that Hungarian kings had invoked since Stephen I accepted his crown from the Pope in the year 1000. In a year when Hungary was defining itself against Vienna, the reverse of its coinage was a theological and political statement simultaneously.

The revolution did not survive the year. By autumn, the Croatian general Jelačić had invaded from the south with Austrian backing. In December, Ferdinand was quietly persuaded to abdicate in favor of his eighteen-year-old nephew Franz Joseph, who immediately repudiated all the concessions his uncle had made, on the grounds that he had never personally agreed to them. Russian troops crossed into Hungary in June 1849 at the invitation of Vienna, and by August the revolution was crushed. Thirteen Hungarian generals were executed at Arad. Kossuth fled into exile, eventually dying in Turin in 1894, still waiting for the Hungary he had briefly held in his hands.

This coin was struck at the precise moment that Hungary believed it had won. The portrait on the obverse belongs to the emperor who said yes. The image on the reverse belongs to the nation that took him at his word.