Timurid Coinage and Money

Between Timur’s conquests in the late fourteenth century and the end of Timurid rule in the early sixteenth, rulers issued coins across territories stretching from Transoxania, the Central Asian lands beyond the Amu Darya, into Iran and Afghanistan. A coin’s weight and metal shaped its monetary value; its ruler’s name, mint (a workshop for striking coins) and stamp also showed who claimed authority over its use. Changes to those features affected both payments and the revenues rulers could extract from money already in circulation.

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Local mints and royal names

Before Timur’s monetary reform, several regional silver-currency zones used distinct weight standards. A ruler controlling towns in more than one zone might therefore issue different coins for each. When Timur conquered a city, his officials often kept its local coin type and replaced the earlier ruler’s name and titles with his own. At Tabriz in northwestern Iran and Shiraz in the southwest, even the design could remain unchanged. A familiar coin could continue circulating while its inscription announced the transfer of political authority.

Coins made that claim in a compact, public form. Near Kesh (modern Shahrisabz, Uzbekistan), south of Samarkand, the envoy Ruy González de Clavijo describes Timur’s three-circle emblem stamped on coins and seals. Clavijo interprets the circles as a claim to rule three parts of the world, and says Timur ordered tributary rulers to place the device on their coins. The mark put the ruler’s claim on money used under subordinate rulers.

Silver tangas and changing standards

In 1392–94, Timur introduced a silver denomination called the tanga across most of his growing realm. The standard tanga weighed about 6.2 grams, equivalent to four local dirhams at Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan. The city and a few peripheral places retained different currencies, and local coin designs continued elsewhere. The reform therefore set a shared weight standard across much of the realm without making every coin look alike.

The standard changed under Timur’s successors. After his death in 1405, the tanga’s weight fell to about 5.65 grams. In 1424, Shah Rukh established the lighter shahrokhi tanga at roughly 5.15 grams and standardized designs at most mints, while allowing some variation on the reverse. This silver standard remained in western Iran under later Timurid and neighboring rulers. In Khorasan, the region around northeastern Iran and western Afghanistan, Sultan Husayn Bayqara reduced the tanga again in 1490, to about 4.78 grams. These changes lowered the stated weight of the silver denomination, so payments recorded in tangas referred to a changing coin standard.

Silver was not the only money in use. In eastern Khorasan and Transoxania, copper coins circulated in the fifteenth century in place of silver. Babur records that in 1497–98 Sultan Masʿud Mirza assigned Khotlan, near modern Dushanbe in Tajikistan, to Shaikh ʿAbd-Allāh Barlas for an annual revenue reckoned at 1,000 tumans in copper coins. The toman was a unit of account, a value used to reckon a payment; the money itself consisted of copper coins called folus. This grant shows how the ruler valued a revenue-bearing town in the currency used in that region.

Countermarks as a tax on money

A countermark is a smaller official stamp punched into a coin that has already been struck. Under Shah Rukh a broad countermarking episode took place around 1411–15. The Chinese envoy Chen Cheng, visiting the Timurid court in 1413, described people paying a tax on their coins before the ruler stamped them; coins without the official mark were illegal. The stamp therefore renewed a coin’s legal validity after its holder paid the charge, allowing the ruler to raise revenue from money already in circulation.

By the late fifteenth century, countermarks were commonly imposed when a new ruler took power, so inherited coins had to be revalidated. In Timurid lands the practice became frequent within a decade of 1485. Some surviving coins carry several successive marks. For a person holding one, each new requirement could mean another fee before it was accepted as lawful money. Shah Rukh’s costly wars in central and western Iran strained the treasury’s silver resources. Iranica interprets that pressure as a reason for the ruler’s broad campaign of countermarking.

A payment recorded by an envoy

Clavijo gives a specific example of coin used in a court payment. At Samarkand in 1404, after a feast honoring Timur’s grandson, officials dressed the Spanish envoys in robes and furs and gave them a bag containing 1,500 silver pieces, which the translator calls tangas. He reports that each was worth two silver rials.

For a broader account of production, revenues and trade, see The Timurid Economy.