@article{TEXTUAL,
      recid = {3541},
      author = {Wollina, Torsten},
      title = {Copper or Silver? The Monetary Situation in Late Mamluk  Damascus},
      publisher = {The Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC)},
      journal = {Mamlūk Studies Review},
      address = {2021},
      number = {TEXTUAL},
      abstract = {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.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3541},
}