Dinar - al-Mahdi no mintname

Al-Mahdi, third Abbasid caliph, inherited a treasury enriched by his father al-Mansur's fiscal austerity and used it partly to fund an aggressive coinage reform. The omission of a mint name on this dinar is deliberate — a long-standing Abbasid convention that positioned the caliph's authority as geographically absolute, requiring no geographic qualifier. Most Abbasid gold of this period was struck at Madinat al-Salam (Baghdad), but the no-mintname type obscures that origin by design.

Album 214 covers a tight reign window. Al-Mahdi died in 785, reportedly thrown from his horse during a hunting expedition in Khurasan.