Fals - al-Manṣūr Qala'un Dimashq mint

Qalawun seized power in 1279 after deposing the young al-Sa'id Baraka Khan, and his early reign was consumed by the Mongol threat from the Ilkhanate and the ongoing erosion of Crusader footholds along the Levantine coast. The Damascus mint was politically significant — control of Syrian coinage was a concrete assertion of Mamluk authority over a city that had changed hands multiple times in the preceding decades. Fals issues from this mint and period circulated in a commercial environment already dominated by the silver dirham; the copper coinage handled the smallest daily transactions that silver simply couldn't serve.