Saluto d'Argento - Charles II

Charles II of Anjou struck this issue while simultaneously navigating one of the most punishing political settlements of the medieval Mediterranean: the War of the Sicilian Vespers, which had erupted in 1282 and stripped the Angevins of Sicily itself, leaving Naples as the rump of what had been a unified kingdom. The saluto d'argento denomination took its name from the Annunciation type, linking dynastic legitimacy to Marian devotion at a moment when the Angevins badly needed both divine and papal sanction.

Charles spent much of this reign as a prisoner of Aragon — captured at the Battle of the Gulf of Naples in 1284 — and did not actually rule in his own right until 1288.