Black Hand:The Assassination of the Archduke & The Great War Coin Box. In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are shot to death by an operative of the Serbian secret society called Unification or Death, commonly known as The Black Hand, which sought independence from the Habsburg monarchy. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I. This box contains a silver denar coin issued by the Kingdom of Serbia that circulated during the Great War. The portrait is of Peter I, the king installed by the Black Hand after the assassination of Alexander I in 1903. The First World War: Four Coins (Mini Album). Four Coins- In 1910, the British lecturer Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion, a book arguing that, because of the prohibitive economic cost, the European powers would be foolhardy to go to war. Therefore, a great war was unlikely. He was right about the cost, and right about the foolhardiness, but dead wrong about the probability. Four years later, for reasons so manifold and complicated that historians argue about the cause to this day, the nations of Europe were fighting exactly the sort of war Angell said wouldn’t happen. In the final analysis, the cost was greater than anyone could have imagined. Ten million civilians, including Armenians slaughtered in the genocide, lost their lives, and almost ten million military perished. Another 20 million were wounded, including soldiers blinded by chemical warfare. Countless buildings were destroyed, and the trenches extended like scars across the Western front. And the economic cost was staggering. The Great War-what would in 1939 be renamed World War One-set the stage for 100 years of geopolitics and international relations. Maps were redrawn, -Worst of all, the appetite for war remained unsated. Two decades after Versailles, the world plunged again into war. This set contains coins of four of the warring nations that circulated during the Great War: a British penny, a German 10 pfennig, a French 10 centimes, and a Serbian 10 dinara.
