1253 | Al Andalus coins

Automatically generated translation

ALMOHADS, Anonymous, quoting Imam Al-Mahdi. Dirham. (Ar. 1.47g/14mm). Silb (Silves) / شلب. (Vives does not cite; Medina does not cite; Gaspariño 2001b; Hohertz 594). VF. Extremely rare. We only know of two other examples, belonging to the legendary and scattered Gaspariño and Tonegawa collections.

"Silves remained a secondary city of the Almohad Empire until its capture by Alfonso Enriquez in 585 AH. When the Almohad caliph al-Mansur received news of the capture, he wasted no time in assembling an army and launching a campaign against it. After a long siege, Silves was finally recaptured. It seems clear that the Almohad coinage minted in Silves cannot be considered sporadic. The reasons why a city would be so secondary this time for coinage can, in our opinion, be one of two things: to pay the army (we know that the Almohads took the Mobile Mint with them on their military expeditions), or to celebrate the city's recapture. In either case, the minting of this coinage would have taken place in 586-7 AH. It seems more likely that it was minted in 586 AH, during the prolonged siege, but it could well have been started in 587 AH to celebrate the city's return to Islam."
https://wearenumismatics.com/coleccion-tonegawa/Sikka/Almohad.htm#[iii]