Bringing the Holy Land Home: The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece

What does this tell us about the Crusades?

The Crusaders' rapid adoption of gold dinars and thus their willingness to use a currency so Islamic in nature is a testament to the value and recognition of gold dinars. The Crusaders knew that minting a new currency could destabilize the economies of newly conquered lands and instead opted to mint imitations of these dinars. While the calligraphy on Fatimid coins was of higher quality than their Crusader imitations, to the untrained eye it is extremely difficult to differentiate the two (See comparison below).







Later, during the Ayyubid dynasty, Pope Innocent IV outlawed Arabic inscriptions on gold dinar entirely; however, while these new coins featured a Christian cross, the inscriptions continued to feature Arabic calligraphy rather than Latin, as Crusaders knew the economy of the Kingdom of Jerusalem depended on the Islamic nature and history of these coins.
 

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