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May God perpetuate her kingdom

  • Writer: sulla80
    sulla80
  • 17 hours ago
  • 5 min read

Today's 2.1g coin of interest carries an unusual legend. The third line on the obverse, in confident thuluth script, runs the formula "khallada Allāhu mulkahā " : خَلَّدَ اللهُ مُلْكَهَا : "may God perpetuate her kingdom." The alif (ا) added at the end of the final word: ملكه becomes ملكها.

The feminine suffix is not a mistake of the engraver. It is acknowledgment that the sovereign whose name fills the field - Sāti Beg Khān - is a woman. The coin was struck at Awnīk in 739 AH (1338-1339 CE), a fortress on the eastern Anatolian frontier, during an unusual  moment in the long unraveling of the Ilkhanate.

Image Source: Castles.nl Avnik Castle, locally known as Avnik Kalesi, lies atop a mountain next to the village of Güzelhisar, in the province of Erzurum in Turkey.
Image Source: Castles.nl Avnik Castle, locally known as Avnik Kalesi, lies atop a mountain next to the village of Güzelhisar, in the province of Erzurum in Turkey.

The Place

Awnīk, today the ruined castle of Avnik in Erzurum Province, sits on a rocky height above the upper Aras valley, near the modern village of Güzelhisar. The site is ancient - likely Urartian in origin.The Urartians were an ancient people who established the kingdom of Urartu, a major Iron Age state centered in the Armenian Highlands between roughly the 9th and 6th centuries BCE. Their kingdom occupied territory spanning parts of present-day eastern Turkey, Armenia, northwestern Iran, and Azerbaijan.

Sometime after 9th century BC; Babylonian Map of the World which mentioned Urartu in the text. (British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Sometime after 9th century BC; Babylonian Map of the World which mentioned Urartu in the text. (British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Constantine VII, writing cica 948–952 CE, refers to this location as Abnikon in De Administrando Imperio, mentioning Abnikon in his analysis of Byzantine frontier strategy in eastern Anatolia. He describes deliberate Byzantine scorched-earth campaigns in Phasiane and around Abnikon intended to starve and isolate Muslim-held Theodosioupolis.


The citadel gained importance under the Ilkhanate, founded by Hülegü Khan, grandson of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. Öljeitü (ruler of the Ilkhanate 1304-1316 and great-grandson of Hülegü Khan), rebuilt the citadel in the early fourteenth century. Tradition holds that Öljeitü's son Abū Saʿīd was proclaimed Ilkhan there in 1316. The fortress controlled the corridor between the Anatolian plateau and the Iranian world, a route the Mongols had used for taxation, troop movement, and a courier system (yām) that linked Tabrīz to Anatolia and the Black Sea. 


The Succession Crisis 

Abū Saʿīd Bahādur Khān died in November 1335, without a son and possibly by poison, ending the direct Hülegüid line and triggering the political fragmentation that historians now treat as the effective end of the unified Ilkhanate. The poisoning story comes from later chroniclers (notably the tradition that Baghdad Khātūn, Abū Saʿīd's wife and Chūpān's daughter, poisoned him), and modern historians treat it with varying skepticism. What followed was a succession crisis and a decade-long contest among regional warlords, each of whom propped up a figurehead from the Chinggisid bloodline to lend his faction legitimacy.


By 1338 the two principal rivals were Shaykh Ḥasan Buzurg ("Big Ḥasan"), founder of what would become the Jalayirid line in Iraq, and Shaykh Ḥasan Kūchak ("Little Ḥasan"), grandson of the powerful amīr Chūpān and architect of Chobanid power in Azerbaijan and eastern Anatolia.


It was Ḥasan Kūchak who turned, in the summer of 1338, to Sāti Beg. She was the daughter of Öljeitü, the sister of Abū Saʿīd, and by then the widow of the very Chūpān whose family now ruled in her brother's stead. Her bloodline was impeccable on both sides of the new political fault line, and that was the point. After defeating his Jalayirid rival at the battle of Naushahr in July 1338, Ḥasan Kūchak raised her to the Ilkhanid throne.


Bruno De Nicola, in his study of women in Mongol Iran, places her among the very small number of Islamic-era sovereigns whose names appeared on coinage with feminine grammar and the title "al-Sulṭān al-ʿĀdil", "the Just Sultan". Her reign lasted roughly nine months. By the summer of 1339 Ḥasan Kūchak married her off to another Chinggisid candidate, Sulaymān Khān, and her independent issues ceased.


The Coin 

ILKHANS. Sāti Beg.(1338 - 1339), Awnīk 739 AH, AR 2 Dirhams (6h, 2.1g, 20.8mm), Type A.

Obv: السلطان العادل / ساتي بك خان / خَلَّدَ اللهُ مُلْكَهَا / ضرب أونيك في سنة تسع وثلاثين وسبعمائة. (al-Sultān al-‘Ādil / Sāti Beg Khān / may Allah perpetuate her kingdom / Struck in Awnīk in the year nine and thirty and seven hundred).

Rev: لا اله الا الله / محمد / رسول الله / ابو بكر عمر عثمان علي. (There is no god but Allah / Muhammad / is the Messenger of Allah / Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali).

Ref: Diler 721; Album 2231.


This unusually well struck and well preserved 2 dirham coin was issued at Awnīk and follows the standard established under Abū Saʿīd's monetary reforms of 1336. On the obverse, within a border, the inscription give the ruler's title, name, the pious prayer for her kingdom, and the mint and date: ḍuriba Awnīk fī sanat tisʿ wa-thalāthīn wa-sabʿmīʾa. The reverse carries the Sunni shahāda across three lines, with the names of the four Rāshidūn caliphs - Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, ʿAlī - arrayed between lobes of the quatrefoil.


At 2.1 grams, the coin sits at the upper end of the post-reform standard introduced by Abū Saʿīd's vizier Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad, in which the nominal dirham weighed roughly one gram and was struck in multiples of two, four, and six. This is therefore a two-dirham piece, the common circulating denomination of the late Ilkhanid silver economy.

The choice of the four Rāshidūn on the reverse is equally pointed. Öljeitü, her father, had famously converted to Twelver Shīʿism (Imāmī) in 1309/10 and altered his coinage accordingly; Abū Saʿīd had reverted to Sunnī formulae after 1322. Sāti Beg's dirhams retain the Sunnī reverse, consistent with Chobanid religious politics and with the dominant character of the Azerbaijan-Anatolia corridor.


The Claim 

This dirham in 1339 stakes a claim. To issue silver in one's own name, at a recognized mint, was to assert that one's authority over the people who bought, sold, and paid taxes. The mint at Awnīk supplied a frontier zone where Mongol garrisons, Turkic pastoralists, Armenian and Greek-speaking villagers, and merchants moving between Erzurum and Tabrīz all met. Silver of consistent weight and recognized issue lubricated that economy. Whether Sāti Beg herself ever saw Awnīk is doubtful; the political center of her short reign was further east, in the Chobanid heartland around Tabrīz and Sulṭāniyya. The coin issued at this remote fortress proclaims her authority, while her person was elsewhere.


Conclusion

The names changed quickly. Sulaymān replaced Sāti Beg on the Chobanid issues within the year, and within a decade the Chobanids themselves had vanished into the further fragmentations that produced the Jalayirids, Muzaffarids, Sarbadārs, and Eretnids. What survives from Awnīk is a two-gram disc of silver, and on it the single alif that acknowledges the Ilkhanid princess' reign.


Bibliography

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