Muhammad II spent much of his reign in open defiance of the Abbasid Caliphate, refusing to acknowledge the Caliph al-Nasir's religious authority and at one point attempting to install a rival caliph in Baghdad — a gambit that collapsed when his army was turned back by a blizzard in the Zagros Mountains in 1217. Farwan, a mint active in the eastern reaches of his empire, was producing coinage like this one even as Genghis Khan's forces were massing on the Syr Darya frontier. The Mongol invasion of 1219–1221 obliterated the Khwarezmian monetary system entirely, making any surviving copper from this period a product of a civilization that ceased to function within years of striking it.
Muhammad II spent much of his reign in open defiance of the Abbasid Caliphate, refusing to acknowledge the Caliph al-Nasir's religious authority and at one point attempting to install a rival caliph in Baghdad — a gambit that collapsed when his army was turned back by a blizzard in the Zagros Mountains in 1217. Farwan, a mint active in the eastern reaches of his empire, was producing coinage like this one even as Genghis Khan's forces were massing on the Syr Darya frontier. The Mongol invasion of 1219–1221 obliterated the Khwarezmian monetary system entirely, making any surviving copper from this period a product of a civilization that ceased to function within years of striking it.