Church of Nossa Senhora da Guia's Choir
The donation of Luís Filipe Thomaz’s precious numismatic collection to the Museum of Angra do Heroísmo continues with its Islamic coin collection. These coins, distinguished by the absence of figures and Arabic inscriptions, naturally entered the historian’s collection with the discovery of the Muslim civilisation, had it not been, as he himself states, “the true corridor of the Old World, through which all trade between China, India, Byzantium and Western Europe took place”.
The collector appreciated and gathered these numismatic species due, not only, to their importance to the Mediterranean world’s economy and, therefore, the coins’ resulting abundance, but also because of a transculturality evident in the coins of the “first conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula”.