Altun has been minted in the royal mint in Kratovo for more than a century

A glimpse into the rich history and economic significance of the royal mint during the Ottoman Empire

Original article was published here.

“Mehmed, son of Khan Murat, bright victory to him  in 1470”, is printed on the obverse of one of the rare preserved coins that were minted during the Ottoman Empire in the mint in Kratovo.

This silver coin is one of the 20 coins that are part of the collection of the Museum of the City of Kratovo and that bear witness to the former important economic and trade center of the Balkans, known for its rich ore deposits and the sultan hass that served at the Istanbul Gate.

As one of the oldest Balkan cities, built on an extinct volcanic crater, which amazes with its medieval stone towers and bridges, it hides numerous mysteries waiting for the visitor to discover, many stories of still unexplored history and culture.

Among them is the famous royal mint in Kratovo, which, together with the mints in Skopje and Ohrid, minted money that was used in the fiscal and monetary system of the entire Ottoman Empire for more than a century and a half. The highest quality and most sought after coins were minted here, because they had constant quality of the metal and a constant weight.

“During the Ottoman rule, three types of money were minted in the Kratovo mint: gold liras and altuns, silver coins known as akce or asper, and copper coins they called mangir. But mostly silver coins were minted, which also had the most series. In order to open a mint, one had to have permission from the sultan, and ready-made moulds were obtained from there. The mint was primitive, and the most important of the professions was the minter, who had the stamp or the hammer with which the obverses and reverses were minted, i.e. the mould for embossing the front and back of the coins,” explains Dragan Gjeorgievski, director of the Museum of the City of Kratovo.

As one of the richest mining centres, known since the ancient mines, in Kratovo there was a mint from the earliest times in which Byzantine, Roman, Serbian and Turkish coins were minted. It worked at full force even during the time of the Christian rulers, such as the Serbian Nemanjici dynasty and Knyaz Konstantin Dejanov, and the widely known Kratovo mines attracted the attention of the Ottomans during the first conquest campaigns in the Balkans. Kratovo was the place where Sultan Murat I (1360-1389) held his last consultation and received the envoy of king Lazar before the Battle of Kosovo in which both rulers died. Soon, Kratovo fell completely under Turkish rule, which revives mining and minting. And the merchant Jakobo de Promontario de Campos from Genoa will mention Kratovo among the first cities in the Balkans and in Macedonia when it comes to silver mines.

“The mines in Macedonia were the main mines in the entire Ottoman Empire, and the Kratovo mine deposits with silver were the richest in the Balkans. Already in 1519/20, Kratovo was a sultan’s hasѕ, with an annual income of over 100,000 akce, that is, a feudal property of the highest category and with the highest incomes.

In 1550, 1,765 kg of pure silver were produced in the mines of Kratovo, and the Venetian envoy of the Turkish court, Katarin Zen, noted that the mines in Kratovo brought the sultan and the Turkish state an annual income of 70,000 ducats. In one imperial order from 1588, the qadi (judge) in Kratovo was asked to procure 1000 kantars (scaleс) of lead for the construction of a mosque in Istanbul, which speaks of the abundance of metal in the Kratovo mines, points out Gjeorgievski, who says that valuable knowledge about the Kratovo mint from this period we learn from the researches of Dr. Ahmet Sherif and Dr. Marjan Dimitrijevski, published in the work of the same name.

During the Ottoman Empire, the mint in Skopje was opened first, in 1471, and in 1486, during the reign of Sultan Bayazit II, the mint in Kratovo started minting money again. It was located in the gorge of the Mala Saravka river in the Tsarina neighbourhood, and the Ottomans kept the found workers who passed this craft down from generation to generation.

At first the ore was washed in the nearby river, and then it was roasted on a fire fuelled by leather bellows and smelted in primitive antique old furnaces in the smelters.

The Sultan issued a special decree on the method of processing ore and metal. After smelting, the silver was taken to the mint where 24 workers worked and silver and gold coins were minted. The mint was managed by an expert manager called sahibi ayar, who supervised the purification of silver, and Kratovo was also the seat of the chief emin (Ottoman official) who was the manager of the mint. Among the specialised “professions” in the mint were the pliers-man (a man who was handling pliers), wire puller (a worker who stretches the drawn metal wire into a thin flat strip), tughra-man (a man who stamped the tughra, i.e. the stylized signature of the sultan on the coins), test-man (a man who tested the metal by placing a test sample in a furnace, which he returns after the test), bleach-man (a man who bleached silver by boiling it in acid, so that it would get a white and shiny colour) and smith, in charge of the entire process from extracting the silver strip to pressing the tughra (seal) on the coins.

“The Kratov Mint, although it was simple and primitive, was one of the most productive in the Ottoman Empire. So far, over 100 types of silver akce have been recorded, as well as gold coins minted during Bayazit II, Suleiman the Great and others, which are found in many numismatic collections, such as the National Bank, museums in Macedonia and private collections around the world. “, says Gjeorgievski.

It is also interesting for the royal mint in Kratovo that it used all types of obverses and reverses, which are not registered in other mints, and also had a special forging mould and type of reverse that was used only in case there was no pre-paid and approved reverse, which means that it had special royal privileges.

The obverses were combined with 20 types of reverses, and permission had to be sought from the central mint in Istanbul for each new minting of akce.

The huge revenues from ore resources, as well as the minting of money, were under strict control of the Ottoman state, and Sultan Bayazit II (1481-1512) ordered his qadis and sanjak-beys to compile laws for the mining activity, after which it flourished. Thus, already in 1519, out of the 10 elders of the Jewish families in the city, 6 were sarafs, that is, tenants of the mines and the mint. However, the golden period for the Kratovo mint occurred during the reign of Sultan Suleiman I, when it was declared a sultan’s has. And the famous travel writer Evlija Celebija notes that in the Kratovo mint during the time of Sultan Murat IV, dirhems (silver coins) and dinars (gold sultans – altuns) were minted.

The Kratovo mint was best known for minting silver coins, known as akce-whites or aspri.  Some of them were so small that they could barely be held in hand. In Kratovo they were minted during the sultans: Bayazit II, Selim I, Suleiman I, Selim II, Murat III, Mehmed III, Ahmed I, Mustafa I, Osman II and Murat IV. The design and calligraphy of silver coins reached their peak during the reign of Suleiman I the Magnificent, who was called Kanuni – Lawgiver. Then an extraordinary series was minted, where on the obverse of the coins was the inscription “May the reign be eternal”. Therefore, some of the Kratovo coins are not only rarities, but also artistic masterpieces.

The Kratovo mint also minted gold sultans (gold coins) from 1520-1595 for three sultans: Suleiman I (1520-1566), Selim II (1566-1574) and Sultan Murat III (1574-1595).

“It was a practice when a new ruler came to the throne that the coins of the previous sultan were withdrawn, which were melted down and a new series of akce and gold coins were minted in the name of the new sultan. The Kratovo gold coins were of high quality, weighing 3.5 grams and had 23.5 carat gold purity. Their value has not changed for more than 200 years, and today 10 gold coins produced in this mint have been registered. One of them is in the numismatic collection of the Museum in Chisinau, Moldova and is considered an extremely rare coin. There are gold coins in Istanbul and in private collections,” points out Gjeorgievski.

Sultan Murat IV was the last ruler who minted money in Macedonian mints. With the arrival of Sultan Ibrahim, who was dissatisfied with the quality of the money and the increasingly widespread counterfeiting of the coins, he ordered the closure of all the provincial mints in Rumelia. Thus, in 1640, the Kratovo mint also stopped working, and only the state mint in Istanbul continued to work.

Author: Zaklina Cvetkovska