100 Rial - Abdulmecid I and Muhammad III

This piece was struck in the final years of direct Ottoman monetary oversight of Tunisia, just as the Bey Muhammad III al-Sadiq was consolidating autonomous financial authority under the Fundamental Pact — the 1857 reformist decree that preceded Tunisia's 1861 constitution, the first of its kind in the Arab world. The dual acknowledgment of both the Ottoman Sultan and the Tunisian Bey on a single coin reflects a carefully managed political fiction: nominal suzerainty maintained on the surface while Tunis increasingly charted its own fiscal course.

Fr#1 in Friedberg's gold census — the leading reference for this denomination — suggests this was the foundational issue of the series.