Mediaeval Sicily, Denaro Of Conrad I

Since I had my Enigma File album unpacked, in order to remove this coin which is now properly identified, I thought I'd have yet another crack at a few of the other coins I've got stashed in there.

Here's one:


As you can see, it's quite dark, but still has lots of detail visible. On one side, there's a cross with diamonds in opposite quarters, with the name "+CONRADVS" around - which had me thinking "Genoa". But the other side didn't look Genoan, with some kind of monogram in the middle, and a legend I couldn't read much of.

At first, I was going to post it in our new ID Required section, but then I thought I'd have a look at CoinArchives. Last time I looked this coin up, I must have either skipped CoinArchives or not typed the right stuff into the search engine (it's quite tricky to get it to tell you what you want to know), because I found an exact match without too much trouble.

It's a base-silver penny (called a "denaro" in Italian) from the Kingdom of Sicily, during the reign of King Conrad I (ruled in Sicily 1250-1254).

The part on the other side I couldn't read says "+IERL ET SICIL", with "RX" in the centre. It translates to "King of Jerusalem and Sicily". Conrad never visited his kingdom in the Holy Land, and the Crusaders had lost control of Jerusalem itself back in 1187. But this coin can still qualify as a "crusader coin".