Dirham - al-Ẓāhir Baybars I

Baybars I came to power through assassination — he led the faction that killed his own sultan, Qutuz, in 1260, weeks after the Mamluks had halted the Mongol advance at Ayn Jalut. That victory, and the political murder that followed it, defined his reign. He spent the next seventeen years systematically dismantling the Crusader presence in the Levant, taking Caesarea, Arsuf, Jaffa, and Antioch in succession. Coins struck under his authority circulated across an empire built almost entirely through military campaigns conducted personally by the sultan.

He also installed a puppet Abbasid caliph in Cairo to legitimize Mamluk rule — a fiction both parties understood and maintained.