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2 results

  • 16 - Numismatics

  • from PART IV - THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF EARLY ISLAMIC HISTORY
  • Edited by Chase F. Robinson
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of Islam
    Published online:
    28 March 2011
    Print publication:
    04 November 2010, pp 648-663

  • Summary

    After being widely neglected following the First World War the study and use of Islamic numismatic documents have again become a prospering academic subject, particularly in the 1990s. Islamic coinage of the middle Islamic period was quite different from the degenerated state of the classical coinage system. Money as a means of coordinating human decisions and economic exchange is a complex social invention. Islamic legal theory determined the value of money to be identical with the intrinsic value of the bullion. The Zubayrid governor had targeted the ideological, religious deficiencies of the Umayyad regime. The Ismaili Shiite Fatimids challenged the Abbasid claim of universal rulership both ideologically and militarily, and thus their coinage named only the Fatimid caliph. After their conquest of Egypt their coins presented a visual distinction to the classical late Abbasid coinage, moving towards a design consisting mainly of rings of concentric inscriptions.

  • 20 - Money and coinage

  • from PART II - GOVERNMENT AND INSTITUTIONS
  • Edited by Rosamond McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 1995, pp 538-560

  • Summary

    Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries can be divided into two broad regions, the coin-producing areas in the west and south where coinage circulated in specie, being normally counted out in transactions, and the areas to the north and east with their bullion economies in which imported coinage and other forms of precious metal were used together by weight. The boundary between the two regions remained remarkably static between the eighth and eleventh centuries, although by the end of the twelfth century most of Europe had some form of regulated currency system. During the first two centuries following the collapse of the western empire, the currencies of the new barbarian kingdoms were based largely on locally produced gold coins. After the reconquest of the Danelaw in the middle of the tenth century, the new unified kingdom devised perhaps the most sophisticated fiscal currency system medieval Europe would see.