Abbasid Coinage, Payments and Credit

The Abbasid caliphate, the realm governed by its caliph (the dynasty’s sovereign), began in 750. Abbasid coins used gold dinars, silver dirhams and local copper issues. The Abbasids established their capital at Baghdad in Iraq in 763–64. From the eighth to tenth centuries, coin inscriptions and payment records show how rulers claimed authority, how receipts were accounted for, and how written orders moved money between distant cities.

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Coins and changing messages

After the Abbasids replaced the Umayyad dynasty in 750, their first official coins largely kept the preceding system. Early issues usually named no individual ruler. That changed in 762, when the mint at Ray, near modern Tehran in Iran, put al-Mahdi’s name on silver dirhams as heir to the caliphate. When he became caliph in 775, his name appeared on dirhams across most of the realm; gold dinars continued without a caliph’s name for several more decades.

The caliphal gold mint moved from Harran, then described as part of northern Syria and now in southeastern Turkey, to Iraq as the caliphs’ residences shifted between cities. Egypt gained a gold mint in 786–87.

The civil war between al-Amin and al-Ma’mun produced competing coins after 809. Their issues proclaimed rival political and religious claims. After al-Ma’mun won in 813, he standardized inscriptions on gold and silver coins. The first reformed coins appeared at Baghdad in 821–22, and the design took about fifteen years to spread across the caliphate. It named the mint and year and added a verse from the Qur’an, Islam’s scripture: “The command is God’s, before and after, and on that day the believers will rejoice in God’s victory.”

Later, regional rulers could add their names beside the Abbasid caliph’s. The Tulunids, who ruled Egypt from 868 to 905, did so on some issues. The regional name signaled autonomy, while retaining the caliph’s name acknowledged his religious authority. A coin could therefore state both a local ruler’s claim and the wider caliphate’s recognized place.

Silver, copper and regional circulation

Silver dirhams served large payments and government transactions. Copper supplied local markets; numismatists infer that these locally valued issues served small daily purchases. In Persia, the historical name for much of present-day Iran, copper coinage largely stopped in the 820s, though production continued at Jiroft into the 840s and elsewhere in the caliphate into the 860s. Transoxania, a Central Asian region centered around present-day Uzbekistan, was different: Bukhara and other mints regularly produced copper coins from the mid-ninth to mid-tenth centuries.

Silver traveled much farther. During the ninth and tenth centuries, Muslim silver coins moved through Transoxania to settlements on the Volga River in western Russia, where traders exchanged them for furs, enslaved people, amber and other northern goods. Hoards and graves from Viking-age Scandinavia contain large numbers of these dirhams. A coin struck for an Abbasid or regional ruler could thus pass through several commercial networks far beyond its mint.

Weighing and recording payments

In Qom, a city in central Iran, a financial officer called a jahbadh weighed incoming coins and goods and transported them to the provincial diwan, or fiscal bureau. A late ninth-century account records the collected value after privileged lands were deducted, converted to gold dinars at seventeen silver dirhams to one dinar, probably as an accounting convention, and compared with the assessed sum to show deficits. Taxpayers preferred monthly installments; officials entered each receipt in a register, balanced the account monthly and at year’s end, and issued a bara’a, a certificate of quittance, after payment.

Written payment orders

A suftaja was a written payment order used to transfer funds between distant markets. Historian Ghislaine Lydon illustrates the mechanism with a traveler on the caravan route between Awdaghust in present-day Mauritania and Sijilmasa in Morocco: he deposits money with a merchant at departure, pays a fee and receives a letter instructing the merchant’s trusted correspondent at the destination to pay him. For a payment to someone else, a messenger carried the order to the correspondent, who paid the named recipient. The traveler could move without carrying the full sum of coin.

Ninth-century sources attest suftajas for Abbasid soldiers’ wages, issued and redeemed by Jewish bankers in Baghdad. A ninth-century Egyptian letter records a merchant paying out a suftaja for one hundred gold dinars to Abū l-ʿAbbās.