Dirham - 'Ilkhan' Arghun Khan Standard type - House of Hulagu - Mongol king

Arghun Khan actively courted Christian Europe as a military ally against the Mamluks of Egypt, dispatching a series of embassies to Rome, Paris, and London throughout his reign — a diplomatic campaign without precedent in Mongol-Islamic statecraft. He was himself a Buddhist who maintained a markedly tolerant court, and his coinage from this period reflects the administrative pragmatism of an Ilkhanate still reconciling Mongol dynastic authority with the Persian-Islamic monetary tradition it had inherited by conquest forty years prior.

He died in 1291, the same year Acre fell to the Mamluks, extinguishing the alliance he had spent his reign trying to forge.