Dirham - al-Hakam II Madinat al-Zahra 360 AH

Al-Hakam II ruled from 961 to 976 and presided over arguably the most intellectually active court in tenth-century Europe — his personal library at Córdoba reportedly held some 400,000 volumes at a time when most European monasteries counted their collections in the hundreds. Madinat al-Zahra, the palatine city commissioned by his father Abd al-Rahman III, functioned as the official mint site for the Córdoban caliphate at its political apex. Dirhams struck there during al-Hakam's reign are distinguished by consistently high silver fineness, a standard his administration maintained with notable discipline relative to later Umayyad issues.

360 AH falls just fifteen years before the caliphate's slow institutional collapse under the regent al-Mansur.