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Spain Gold 100 Pesetas, Alfonso XIII (1897)

Category:  World Coins
Owner:  JohnA
Last Modified:  7/3/2024
Set Description
Circulation Issue. One-year type, 1897, with restrikes in 1961 and 1962. For restrike examples, please refer to my Custom Set titled "Spain Gold Pesetas Official Restrikes (1961, 1962)."

OBVERSE: Portrait of Alfonso XIII engraved by Bartolomé Maura in July 1895 when Alfonso XIII was 9 years old.

REVERSE: The center image is the royal coat of arms showing the five major realms of unified Spain: the castle for Castile, the lion for León, the stripes for Aragón, the linked chains for Navarre, and (at the bottom) the pomegranate (granada) for Andalusía. The fleurs-de-lis in the center represent the House of Bourbon dynasty of kingship. The coat of arms is flanked with the collar and insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece, an exclusive order of European royalty of which the king of Spain is the sovereign member. The two pillars represent the Pillars of Hercules at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, and the banner "plus ultra" ("further beyond") recognizes Spain's overseas provinces and colonies.

In the Slot Name and the Item Description of the set coin, below, the numbers in parentheses identify the date of actual mintage, stamped incusely into the stars located on either side of the authorization date. The authorization date, seen clearly on the coin, is the date of the Spanish law that authorized the minting of a particular quantity of this denomination for legal coinage. From 1868 to 1982 all Spanish peseta coins contained two dates, the authorization date and the mintage date. The use of two dates on regular coinage is a distinctive feature of Spanish peseta coins and is not seen elsewhere in the world.

On this coin, which was both authorized and minted in 1897, the left star reads "18" and the right star reads "97." However, on other coins the authorization date and the mintage date are not always the same. For instance, when restrikes of this 100 Peseta coin were minted in 1961 and 1962, the authorization date remained 1897 but the dates in the stars were "19" in the left star and either "61" or "62" in the right star.

The three initials in the Item Description (SGV) are the initials of the two mint assayers and the mint's scale judge who PERSONALLY guaranteed the coin's purity and weight. SGV = Sandoval, Garcia, Vega. Their initials appear on the reverse side of the coin, assayers to the left, scale judge to the right.

The mint mark is the 6-pointed star, meaning "minted in Madrid." Mints in other Spanish cities used 3-, 4-, 7-, or 8-pointed stars, but those mints had closed by 1870. All gold peseta coins for Spain were minted in Madrid.

Coin weight 32.25806 grams. Purity 900 fine.
Coin diameter 35 millimeters, thickness 2.4 millimeters.
Gold content 0.9334 ounce.

Set Goals
One-Year Type with Set Description.

Slot Name
Origin/Country
Item Description
Full Grade
Owner Comments
Pics
View Coin 100 PESETAS 1897 (*18-*97) SPAIN 1848 TO DATE G100P 1897(97) SGV KM708 NGC MS 62 Mintage: 149,762.
Portrait of Alfonso XIII engraved by Bartolomé Maura in July 1895 when Alfonso XIII was 9 years old.
SGV = Sandoval, Garcia, Vega.

Somewhat common in circulated condition. Scarce in Mint State condition.

The 100-peseta coins, minted only in 1897, helped finance Spain's military operations in its province of Cuba that it had governed for 400 years. Ultimately Spain lost Cuba in 1898 after imperialist aggressors in the United States "boldly" provoked a war against the then 11-year-old king of Spain.

By the 1930s, the majority of these 100-peseta coins were being stored in Spain's national gold reserve at the Bank of Spain in Madrid. In his 2001 book "El oro de Moscú y el oro de Berlín," Professor Pablo Martín-Aceña includes a picture (between pp 128-129) from the Bank of Spain's photograph archives that shows a 4' x 4' metal display table in the Bank vault with Spanish 100-peseta coins stacked on top in a pyramid shape and encased with a protective glass cover. Using 15 coins per stack (or, in some tiers, 14 coins per stack), the base of the pyramid consisted of a square of 27 stacks x 27 stacks (total of 729 stacks), then tapered to a square of 26 x 26 (676 stacks), and continued tapering to a single stack at the top, forming a pyramid totaling 27 tiers. Altogether the "pirámide de monedas españolas de oro" contained 100,000 100-peseta coins ("10 millones de pesetas"), which is about two-thirds of the total original mintage.

These coins were shipped to the Soviet Union in November 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War when the Republican government, who controlled Madrid but was under siege, sought to buy armaments from the Soviet Union and other countries. The Republican government shipped to Moscow most of the national gold reserve housed in Madrid, an amount of 510 tonnes of gold, almost all of it in gold coins minted by fifteen countries (sovereigns, pesetas, francs, marks, lire, etc) that made Spain's gold reserve the fourth largest in the world at the time. The reserve was then systematically sold off to purchase war materials. Since the 100-peseta coins had no numismatic premium at the time, it is likely that they were melted down. You can read an Internet account of this fascinating historical episode at Wikipedia's article titled "Moscow Gold (Spain)."

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