2 1/2 Dirhams - Abd al-Aziz Berlin Mint

Abd al-Aziz ascended the Moroccan throne in 1894 at roughly fourteen years old, leaving real authority in the hands of the regent Ba Ahmed ibn Musa until the latter's death in 1900. The Berlin Mint contract for this series reflects the broader scramble among European powers to embed themselves commercially in Moroccan state functions — Germany among them, competing with French and Spanish financial interests that would ultimately partition the country a decade later. The Morocean treasury's reliance on European mints for silver coinage during this reign was itself a symptom of the fiscal disarray that made Morocco vulnerable to foreign intervention.