Muhammad II of Khwarazm was, by 1217, ruler of an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Aral Sea — and sufficiently confident in his power to declare the Abbasid Caliph al-Nasir unfit for office, a move of staggering political recklessness. Within a decade, the Mongol invasions he provoked through the massacre of Genghis Khan's trade delegation at Otrar in 1218 had effectively erased his dynasty. Billon jitals from the Bamiyan regional issue belong to the last years before that collapse, circulating in a province that the Mongols would later destroy so thoroughly that its population never fully recovered.
Muhammad II of Khwarazm was, by 1217, ruler of an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Aral Sea — and sufficiently confident in his power to declare the Abbasid Caliph al-Nasir unfit for office, a move of staggering political recklessness. Within a decade, the Mongol invasions he provoked through the massacre of Genghis Khan's trade delegation at Otrar in 1218 had effectively erased his dynasty. Billon jitals from the Bamiyan regional issue belong to the last years before that collapse, circulating in a province that the Mongols would later destroy so thoroughly that its population never fully recovered.