Ottoman Coinage and Currency
The akçe, para, kuruş, and sultani: silver and gold coinage in the Ottoman Empire, the long debasement, the imperial darphane, and the 19th-century monetary reform.
The akçe struck by Orhan in the early fourteenth century was a small, high-silver coin of about 0.94 g — a piece a little smaller than a Venetian grosso and, like it, intended for everyday use. By 1687 the same coin was being struck at roughly 0.05 g of fine silver, a loss of more than ninety per cent, and the akçe had effectively disappeared from circulation. The history of Ottoman currency is, in its most condensed form, the history of that debasement, and the history of the three attempts to fix it — the sultani-gold standard of the sixteenth century, the kuruş-silver standard of the seventeenth, and the decimal lira of 1881. The story is an essential part of the broader Ottoman economy and trade, and Şevket Pamuk’s A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (2000) is the indispensable modern account.
Key dates
- c. 1326 — First akçe struck under Orhan; c. 0.94 g fine silver.
- 1478 — First sultani struck under Bayezid II; c. 3.45 g fine gold.
- 1584 — Severe debasement; silver content of akçe falls to c. 0.32 g.
- 1687 — Akçe at c. 0.05 g; kuruş becomes the working coin.
- 1695 — Esham reform; state debt becomes a tradable instrument.
- 1844 — Mecidiye struck under Abdülmecid I; modeled on the French 20-franc piece.
- 1863 — Ottoman Bank founded; banknotes issued.
- 1881 — Decimal reform: 1 lira = 100 kuruş; Muharrem Kararnamesi and the Public Debt Administration.
The akçe: the basic silver coin
The akçe was introduced in the early 14th century under Orhan, the second Ottoman sultan; its name derives from the Byzantine aspron (white) or the Italian grosso, both of which it resembled. The first akçes were of high silver content, and the early Ottoman coinage was a model of stability. Under Mehmed II and Bayezid II the akçe continued to be struck in good silver, and it was the principal unit of account throughout the empire.
The akçe was, however, a small coin. The standard of account was 3 akçes to 1 para and — for the core classical period from roughly 1480 to 1580 — about 40 akçes to 1 gold sultani. The sultani-to-akçe ratio was not fixed across the empire’s history: it stood near 35 in the late 15th c., rose to 60 and beyond after the debasements of Murad III, and effectively lost meaning by the 17th c. Because most daily transactions involved sums far in excess of a single akçe, larger transactions were conducted in gold or, from the seventeenth century, in the kuruş. The akçe remained the unit of account, however, and salaries, taxes, and fines continued to be expressed in akçes long after the actual coins in circulation had been heavily debased.
The darphane and the trial of the pyx
Ottoman coins were struck at the darphane (imperial mint), an institution with a continuous history from the reign of Mehmed II. The principal mints were in Istanbul (the main mint, attached to the Topkapı complex), Edirne, Bursa, Cairo, and a number of provincial centres that opened and closed with the strategic priorities of the state: Kayseri, Konya, Amid (Diyarbakır), Erzurum, Sidrekapsi (Üsküp/Skopje), Buda, Sarajevo, and, for a time, Belgrade and Baghdad. Each mint was staffed by a darphane emini (mint superintendent), a number of sarrac (assayers), and the master die-cutters, who were often Greek or Armenian Christians with inherited technical knowledge.
New issues had to pass the taqîb (literally “following” or “tracking”) — the Ottoman equivalent of the European trial of the pyx. A sample of every batch of new coin was assayed by the sarrac, and the silver or gold content certified against the imperial standard. The procedure was rigorous enough that European merchants accepted Ottoman silver at face value in the early sixteenth century, and the reputation was a real economic asset. As the debasements of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proceeded, the taqîb was repeatedly compromised; the darphane emini was sometimes in collusion with the sarraf (banker) houses that financed the mints, and Pamuk has reconstructed several cases in which the recorded silver content was falsified. The taqîb was, in short, a real institution whose integrity declined with the integrity of the state.
The gold sultani and the gold trade
The gold sultani was a high-purity gold coin first struck in 1478 under Bayezid II, and continued by Suleiman the Magnificent as a stable international currency competing with the Venetian ducat and the Egyptian ashrafi. The sultani circulated widely across the Islamic world, in Safavid Persia, in Mughal India, and in the Arabian peninsula. It was an important international currency, and it helped the Ottomans conduct large-scale trade with the East. The sultani was supplemented by the heavier gold piece called the zer-i mahbub and by the yüzlük, a higher denomination for very large transactions; the yüzlük was largely a notional accounting unit, struck only occasionally.
The gold trade was a substantial sector of the Ottoman economy. Gold was imported from West Africa via the trans-Saharan trade, from Europe through the capitulations, and from the mines of Ethiopia and Sudan, and it was re-exported to Persia and India. The mints in Istanbul, Bursa, Cairo, and Aleppo produced coin for both domestic and foreign use, and the prestige of the sultani was such that it was imitated in the mints of neighbouring states.
Debasement and crisis
The akçe was debased repeatedly from the late sixteenth century onward. The wars of that period, the growing burden of military expenditure, and the chronic shortage of silver from the European mines put the Ottoman state under severe pressure, and the standard response was to reduce the silver content of the akçe rather than to raise taxes. The trajectory is well documented by numismatists and by Pamuk’s price-history work; the following table gives the approximate silver content of the akçe by sultan, drawn from the standard numismatic literature (Porte and the Tarih-i Darphane).
| Sultan | Approx. silver content (g) |
|---|---|
| Orhan (c. 1326) | ~0.94 |
| Murad I | ~0.85 |
| Bayezid I | ~0.65 |
| Mehmed II (post-conquest) | ~0.68 |
| Bayezid II | ~0.55 |
| Selim I | ~0.48 |
| Süleyman I | ~0.42 |
| Selim II | ~0.32 |
| Murad III | ~0.25 |
| Mehmed III | ~0.15 |
| Ahmed I | ~0.10 |
| Mustafa I | ~0.07 |
| Murad IV | ~0.10 |
| 1687 (post-Vienna) | ~0.05 |
The collapse was not monotonic; the brief recovery under Murad IV (1623–40), accompanied by his ferocious austerity programme (he banned tobacco and coffee and walked the streets of Istanbul in disguise enforcing the ban), is real. The collapse of 1640–87, on the other hand, was the most rapid of the whole series, and it correlates with the Karlowitz defeat of 1699 and the fiscal emergency that produced the esham reform of that year.
The effect of debasement on the economy was severe. Prices, expressed in akçes, rose sharply, particularly the prices of goods that had a fixed value in the world market. Soldiers, officials, and pensioners whose pay was fixed in akçes found their real income falling rapidly, and the state was forced to pay them in larger denominations: the para, the kuruş, and various larger gold and silver pieces. The collapse of the akçe did not destroy the Ottoman monetary system, but it did undermine its predictability and made the long-term planning of state finance very difficult. The price revolution of the sixteenth century, driven by the influx of American silver through European trade, hit the Ottoman economy as well, and the state’s response was, as already noted, debasement rather than taxation. The result was a long period of inflation that historians have documented in the price records of the great foundations and pious endowments of Istanbul and Bursa.
“The akçe is now but a name: what passes for a hundred akçes in the bazaar is, in the reign of Mehmed IV, a small copper mangır and a piece of stamped leather. The soldiers will not march and the yeniçeri will not parade for pay that is honest only on the divani’s books.” — Katip Çelebi, Düstûrü’l-Amel li-Islâhi’l-Halel (c. 1653), on the late-seventeenth-century fiscal crisis.
The kuruş and the eighteenth century
By the eighteenth century the working coin of the Ottoman economy was the kuruş (piastre), a large silver coin of about 20–25 grams at its 17th-century peak, falling to under 5 grams by the 19th c. as the silver content of Ottoman coinage continued to deteriorate. The kuruş was supplemented by smaller denominations, including the para, the akçe (now a token coin), and various gold and silver pieces. The kuruş was a heavy coin, and it was difficult to handle in large numbers, but it had the merit of a stable silver content, and it was the principal unit of account for many transactions.
The eighteenth century also saw a growing shortage of specie, particularly silver. The European powers were draining silver from the Ottoman economy in payment for the manufactured goods that were now flooding the Ottoman market under the capitulations. The Ottoman balance of payments turned steadily against the empire, and the state was forced to borrow from European banks at high rates of interest. The Public Debt Administration, established in 1881, took over the collection of several Ottoman revenues and remitted the proceeds to European creditors.
The 19th-century reform
The 19th century saw a thorough reform of the Ottoman monetary system, modeled on European practice. The first important step was the introduction in 1844 of the mecidiye, a gold coin named after Sultan Abdülmecid I and modeled on the French 20-franc piece. The mecidiye was of high purity and stable weight, and it was the first of a series of European-style gold and silver pieces. The next step was the creation in 1863 of the Ottoman Bank, a Franco-British institution granted the right to issue banknotes. The banknotes circulated widely and helped to fill the gap left by the chronic shortage of specie.
The reform was completed in 1881 with the introduction of a decimal currency: 1 lira = 100 kuruş. The system was modeled on the franc and the mark, and it remained in use, with various modifications, in the Turkish Republic. The transition to a European-style currency was one of the major institutional reforms of the late Ottoman period, and it reflected both the influence of European economic models and the long-term integration of the Ottoman economy into the world market. Donald Quataert’s chapter on monetary affairs in The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 is the standard brief account; for the earlier period, Pamuk is indispensable.
Frequently asked questions
What was the basic Ottoman coin?
The basic Ottoman coin for most of the empire’s history was the silver akçe (akçe), introduced in the early 14th century under Orhan. From the seventeenth century the larger silver kuruş (piastre, or guruş in older sources) became the working coin of everyday life, and from the late nineteenth century the gold lira (= 100 kuruş) was the principal denomination. All three terms — akçe, kuruş, and lira — survived into the republican Turkish currency.
Why did the akçe lose so much value?
The akçe lost value because the Ottoman state debased it, not once but in a long series of crises between 1585 and 1687. The wars of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the chronic shortage of silver, and the state’s reluctance to raise taxes all combined to push the government to reduce the silver content of each new issue. By 1687 the akçe was being struck at about 0.05 g of fine silver, less than a tenth of its fifteenth-century weight. The 1695 esham reform and the introduction of the malikâne life-term tax farm were direct fiscal responses to the crisis the debasement created.
What was the mecidiye?
The mecidiye was a gold coin introduced in 1844 under Sultan Abdülmecid I, modeled on the French 20-franc piece. It was the first of a series of European-style gold and silver coins that ended the long Ottoman reliance on debased silver, and it set the standard for the 1881 decimal reform. A mecidiye is roughly 6.05 g of fine gold.
Sources and further reading
- Şevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- Şevket Pamuk, “The Evolution of Financial Institutions in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1914,” Financial History Review 11.1 (2004): 7–32.
- Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, 1600–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
- Edhem Eldem, “Capitulations and Western Trade,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 3.
- Nützel, Münzen des Osmanischen Reiches (in Zeitschrift für Numismatik, 1891), still useful for the debasement series.
Related articles
- The Ottoman economy and trade — The fiscal and monetary context in which the coinage operated.
- Trade routes and the silk road — The trade routes in which Ottoman coinage circulated.
- The capitulations and their consequences — The treaties that gave European merchants access to the Ottoman monetary system.
- The spice trade under the Ottomans — A major sector of the Ottoman economy paid for in akçes, kuruş, and sultani.
- The timar system — The prebendal land system that was assessed and paid in akçes.