1 Denaro first type - Alfonso I

Alfonso I of Aragon seized Naples in 1442 after a decade of war against the Angevin claimants, entering the city through a breach in the walls his engineers had tunneled beneath. This denaro belongs to the earliest phase of his Neapolitan coinage, issued as he worked to consolidate a monetary system that had been badly disrupted by the prolonged dynastic conflict. The billon content reflects chronic silver shortages that plagued southern Italian minting through much of the mid-fifteenth century.