Pietro III of Aragon seized the Sicilian crown in 1282 following the Vespers uprising — the spontaneous massacre of French Angevin troops that began in Palermo on the evening of March 30th and spread across the island within weeks. His coinage replaced that of the Angevin Charles I almost immediately, a deliberate assertion of the new political order. The billon denaro was the workhorse of daily Sicilian commerce, and Pietro's issues circulated through a kingdom still actively at war with Angevin forces and their French backers for the entirety of his reign.
Pietro III of Aragon seized the Sicilian crown in 1282 following the Vespers uprising — the spontaneous massacre of French Angevin troops that began in Palermo on the evening of March 30th and spread across the island within weeks. His coinage replaced that of the Angevin Charles I almost immediately, a deliberate assertion of the new political order. The billon denaro was the workhorse of daily Sicilian commerce, and Pietro's issues circulated through a kingdom still actively at war with Angevin forces and their French backers for the entirety of his reign.