Dirham - al-Muntasir

Al-Muntasir's reign lasted exactly six months — December 861 to June 862 — making this one of the shortest-lived Abbasid caliphates and its coinage among the rarest in the series. He came to power having conspired in the assassination of his own father, al-Mutawakkil, a murder carried out by Turkish military commanders whose influence over the caliphate had by this point become effectively absolute. Al-Muntasir himself died within months, almost certainly poisoned on orders from those same Turkish commanders, who found even their own chosen caliph inconvenient.