Money and Coinage in Mamluk Lands

Money in the Mamluk Sultanate included locally minted gold, silver and copper as well as coins arriving from abroad. Their names appear in prices, debts and official accounts, but the same term did not always identify a coin of one unchanging value. Weight, metal content and accepted exchange rates affected what a payment meant. Conditions also differed between Egypt and the Syrian provinces.

The usual terms were dinar for gold, dirham for silver and fals, plural fulus, for copper or other base-metal money. A dirham could also be a weight or an accounting unit. Reading a recorded sum therefore requires more than counting how often a coin name appears.

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Precious-metal coins and weighing

Early Mamluk gold coins were often highly pure but varied considerably in weight. Warren Schultz’s review of the monetary evidence explains why these pieces had to be weighed in transactions. An exchange depended on the quantity and quality of gold, not solely on the number of pieces passed between payer and recipient.

Coins of earlier rulers commonly remained in circulation. Foreign money, including Italian gold coins, also reached Mamluk markets through commerce. Several issues could therefore be present together. A merchant or money changer had to recognise their relative values, while a contract could specify a particular kind of payment.

Silver coins also varied in weight and fineness. Their relationship to gold was not an immutable conversion table. Changes in the available metal and official issues could affect the rate at which obligations written in one form of money were settled in another.

Barsbay’s gold and the later dinar

Barsbay’s reign, 1422–1438, established the gold issue known as the ashrafi, named from his royal title al-Ashraf. Its size, appearance and weight provided a model followed by subsequent Mamluk gold coinage. Later coins could be called ashrafis even when issued by a different sultan.

This greater consistency made the later gold coinage different from the irregularly weighted pieces of the earlier period. It did not guarantee permanent purity: fineness declined in the closing decades. A stable-looking denomination could still change in its material value.

Copper in everyday exchange

Copper became especially important in Egyptian prices and payments around the beginning of the fifteenth century. Sources describe contracts and debts in terms of copper money, including amounts expressed by weight. It served transactions at a different scale from much of the gold moving through large commercial exchanges.

The relationship between a copper sum in an account and the pieces used to pay it could change. A name in the record was not always a count of identical coins. Accounts consequently recorded obligations within the monetary conditions of their own date and place.

Damascus and local monetary practice

Torsten Wollina’s study of late Mamluk Damascus uses chronicles and the observations of writers such as Ibn Tawq to examine transactions around the turn of the sixteenth century. It finds a different pattern from Cairo: silver continued to matter strongly, and the exchange between gold and silver appeared comparatively stable until late in the fifteenth century. Syrian mints continued producing silver issues.

In Damascus, local minting and the use of silver continued to shape payments while copper was prominent in Egyptian accounts. Merchants and other residents made transactions within these regional systems of prices and exchange.