Copper or Silver? The Monetary Situation in Late Mamluk Damascus

The economic history of the medieval Arabic Middle East is difficult to reconstruct. Before the sixteenth century, systematic documentary evidence is lacking on all levels, the current state of the region makes further archaeological excavations almost impossible, and the many narrative (mostly historiographical) texts are often inadequate to allow for any statistical approximation without corroborating evidence from other sources. Based on five annalistic texts—two by Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546) and one each by Aḥmad Ibn al-Ḥimṣī (d. 1528), ʿAlī al-Buṣrawī (d. 1500), and Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq (d. 1509)—this article returns to the long-standing debate of whether the so-called "age of copper" indeed came to an end during the fifteenth century or extended into the Ottoman period. In the monetary context, we know much more about issues and uses of gold coins—which were restricted to small segments of society—than about the relations between silver and copper coinage and their impact on small-scale, everyday transactions, which would have made up the vast majority of the local economy. Most work on the subject has focused on Cairo; Syria has only been regarded as secondary. This study focuses on a long neglected period, approximately the later 1480s until the early 1520s, and on developments in Mamluk Syria. It engages exclusively with Damascene narrative sources, whose authors were immersed in Syrian society and paid closer attention to events there than counterparts in Egypt. This approach puts Damascus and other Syrian cities on the map of the economic and monetary history of the Mamluk period and shows that the monetary situation there differed from that in late Mamluk Cairo.