Coinage and Money in Safavid Iran

Silver coins paid for goods, wages and taxes in Safavid Iran, while accounting units allowed officials and merchants to express larger sums. The coins themselves advertised royal authority through their inscriptions. Their production also depended on the arrival and movement of precious metal, including silver brought by overseas commerce.

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Coins and units of account

The shahi was an important silver denomination. Under the accounting relationship used in the later Safavid system, a shahi represented fifty dinars. Abbas I introduced the abbasi, worth four shahis, or two hundred dinars. A toman represented ten thousand dinars, equivalent in this reckoning to fifty abbasis.

The toman was a unit of account rather than a coin routinely struck for each payment. A debt stated in tomans could therefore be paid using a number of smaller coins. Knowing the denomination and the accounting unit was essential to understanding a recorded price or tax demand.

Gold coins, including the ashrafi, also circulated. Their value against silver could vary with the relative prices of the metals. Copper coinage served smaller transactions and had a more local circulation than the principal silver denominations.

Inscriptions and royal authority

Safavid coin legends proclaimed Shiite belief. They could include the profession of faith with an affirmation of Ali’s authority and the names of the Twelve Imams. Alongside religious inscriptions appeared information identifying a ruler, mint or date.

Persian inscriptions became increasingly prominent during the dynasty. Abbas I’s presentation of himself as a servant of Ali placed a ruler’s name within a devotional formula. The coin was thus both a piece of accepted metal and a small, repeatedly handled statement of the monarchy’s religious commitments.

Mints, weight and oversight

Tahmasp I introduced a more uniform silver standard in 1547 after earlier regional variation. Later rulers altered the standards, including reductions during the dynasty’s troubled final years. The name of a denomination consequently does not guarantee that every surviving coin bearing it had the same weight throughout Safavid history.

Mint officials supervised striking, and an imperial assay office oversaw the quality of precious metal. These controls mattered because the usefulness of a coin depended on confidence in its metal content. Recoinage could also yield income through the charges imposed for converting silver into current coin.

Foreign money and regional forms

Merchants brought European silver into Iran in payment for silk and other exports. Dutch lion dollars and Spanish pieces of eight were among the foreign coins encountered in trade. Some foreign silver circulated, while some passed through mints to become Safavid money. Gold ducats likewise entered commercial exchange.

Regional currencies added further variety. The bent silver-wire larin, associated with Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean commerce, belonged to a different coin form from the flat silver shahi. Merchants dealing across regions needed to compare weights, metal and current exchange values, rather than rely solely on a familiar coin name.

These practices joined Iranian markets to a wider movement of bullion. The balance of imports, exports and demands for precious metal affected the money available to the court and to private traders. Written accounts translated this changing mixture of coins into the units used for prices, debts and revenue.

For the wider setting, see The Safavid Economy. For state receipts and expenditure, see Taxation and State Revenue in Safavid Iran.