ABSTRACT
The exploitation of the rich resources of silver from the mines in Islamic Central Asia had a considerable effect on Eastern and Northern Europe. Nearly 400,000 Arabic coins have so far been found in several hundred hoards from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Germany and Scandinavia (Figure 13.1). If one adds numerous pieces of jewelry and ingots made of melted dirhams also discovered in Eastern Europe, one can safely assume that the actual number of such coins was far higher, probably in the order of millions. As a matter of fact, Thomas S. Noonan has estimated that between 100 and 200 million dirhams, the equivalent of 300–600 tons of silver, were moved from the Islamic world to the European Russia and the Baltic. About 80 percent of those coins were struck in the name of Samanid rulers in Central Asia and could be directly associated with the 10th-century trade. 1 Dirham networks in the tenth century (asterisks: hoards of at least ten coins). Map drawn by Lech Rowiński. After Dariusz Adamczyk, <italic>Monetarisierungsmomente, Kommerzialisierungszonen oder fiskalische Währungslandschaften? Edelmetalle, Silberverteilungsnetzwerke und Gesellschaften in Ostmitteleuropa (800–1200)</italic> (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2020), p. 46 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429276217/771ae919-ff2a-43ca-ab13-4c3e4330d2ab/content/Fig13_01.jpg"/>
