4 - Monotheisation in Metal

Summary

‘The silver is mine and the gold is mine’, declares the LORD Almighty.

Haggai 2:8 (NIV)

In the seventh to ninth centuries, the Islamic caliphs, Roman/Byzantine emperors and Khazarian khağans minted coins which proclaimed their respective monotheistic affiliations: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. This chapter explores how gold and silver coin reforms representing divinity were a major departure from previous coins which primarily represented rulers. The first section, ‘Empires of Faith and their Finances’, charts the confessional coin reforms of these three ‘empires of faith’ from the late seventh century to Khazaria’s Moses coins of the late 830s. The second section, ‘Coinage and “Commonwealth” (Ninth to Eleventh Century): the Ummah and the Oikoumene’, expands to include the monotheistic coinages of some eleventh- to thirteenth-century peripheral dynasties within the Islamic ummah and the Christian oikoumene and explores hints of Judaic involvement in otherwise Islamic and Christian mints across the worlds of both Islam and Christendom.

Empires of Faith and their Finances

According to the mid-tenth-century De Ceremoniis, emperor Konstantinos VII ranked the Khazarian khağan after the Christian Roman emperor and the Islamic caliph in importance based on weight in gold on correspondence seals. These empires of faith minted coins to display their respective official monotheisms as seventh- to ninth-century top-down political programmes. As a ‘third force’, Khazarian coin reforms should be considered alongside the other two Abrahamic ecumenical empires.

Having conquered lands inhabited by erstwhile Roman subjects, early caliphs beginning with the Prophet Mohammed mostly avoided coin reforms. This changed in the years 696–7 under caliph ‘Abd al-Malik, when the first purely Islamic coin, a gold dinar, appeared, manifesting the supremacy of the Shahada in Arabic, being the coins’ only reference. This coinage initiated a period of expressly Islamic reforms for coinage and other domestic policies. Along with the coin reforms, these Islamisation policies were primarily reflected in the adoption of Arabic as the ruling language, dislodging ‘Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Pehlevi’. While ‘Abd al-Malik was not the first to attempt coin reform, historians still debate whether his policies influenced Byzantine iconoclasm.