Exarachellos: Dirhams in Tenth-Century Barcelona

1. Dirhams in Barcelona

On 28th April 1009, a certain Guimara in Barcelona donated eleven exarachellos de argento for the restoration of the Monastery of Sant Pere de les Puelles.¹ Feliu i Montfort & Salrach i Marés, Els Pergamins, no. 96 (1009): super hoc addedistis nobis sumam pecunie, id est XI mancusos aureos et XI exarachellos de argento, quod expendimus in restaurationem prefati cenobii. Further mentions of three or twelve exarachellos can be found in two local sales documents from the years 986 and 988.² Fàbrega i Grau, Diplomatari, no. 166 (986): exarachellos III de argento and no. 181 (988): exarachellos XII de argento. Both cases concern the sale of land that was pledged as security for loans in the amounts mentioned. Research has suggested different explanations for this enigmatic name. Exarachellos were presumed to be coins from the Byzantine exarchate in Italy or they would be no coins at all, but silver jewels such as rings or bangles. The Catalan numismatist Joaquim Botet i SisóBotet i Sisó, Joaquim, Les monedes catalanes, vol. 1, Barcelona, IEC, 1908. assumed that exarachello was not the actual denomination of a coin, but a popular name.³ Botet i Sisó, Les monedes, p. 31; Mateu y Llopis, Glosario, p. 75f.; Pagès i Paretas, “L’epitafi”, p. 216, note 36 with an overview of the different explanations; see also Feliu i Montfort, “La moneda”, p. 113; and Jarrett, “Currency,” p. 226, note 65.

In addition to the eleven exarachellos, Guimara also donated eleven mancusos aureos to the monastery. Under this name local charters recorded, around the year 1000, gold dinars imported from al-Andalus.⁴ Bonnassie, La Catalogne, pp. 372-376; Quinsat & Bonnassie, “Le ‘mancusus’”, pp. 305-307; Manzano & Canto, “The Value”, pp. 190-193. Guimara’s donation classifies mancusos and exarachellos as a ‘sum of money’ (sumam pecunie), so exarachellos will have been coins as well. The deeds of 986, 988 and 1009 were written by three different scribes. The name was therefore not the result of someone’s imagination. At the time in question, the term exarachello must have been in use in Barcelona as the designation for a silver coin accepted as a means of payment.

Before trying to clarify the meaning of this name, we need to know which coins circulated in Barcelona towards the end of the 10th century. Formally still part of West Francia, the Catalan counties also remained in the Carolingian coinage system, which was based on silver. The only official coin was the silver denarius minted in the local Mint of Barcelona. Twelve denarii made one solidus, which only served as a unit of account and did not exist as a minted coin (solidos de denarios). We have only incomplete information concerning the weight and silver content of the denarius in tenth-century Barcelona. The few coin finds indicate an increasing debasement, whereby the denarii finally weighed less than 0.5 g and had a low silver content. It was not before Count Ramon Borrell (993-1018) that heavy denarii were minted again, weighing 1.3 g.⁵ Feliu i Montfort, “La moneda”; Jarrett, “Currency”; Balaguer, Història, pp. 63-70.

In addition to these debased denarii, silver coins of high quality imported from al-Andalus were also in circulation in Barcelona at the time.⁶The Andalusi gold dinars (mancusos) can be disregarded for the time being. See paragraph 3 below. Eleven documents from the years between 981 and 1041 mention coins that -in different variants- were called solidos de argento caceminos de Ispania.⁷ Bonnassie, La Catalogne, pp. 384-386; those dirhams circulated also in the Kingdom of León at the time, see Manzano & Canto, “The Value”, p. 187. Here the name solidus, previously used to denote a unit of account, was given to an actual coin. To distinguish them from the local denarii, the “Spanish” origin of this foreign currency was mentioned (Ispania). Finally, the adjective cacemino referred to the head of the Mint of Córdoba, Qāsim ibn Ḫālid, who in 330/941 initiated the coinage of dirhams with a high silver content.⁸ Chalmeta Gendrón, “Précisions”, pp. 316-321; Canto García, “La reforma”; Frochoso Sánchez, Las monedas califales, pp. 35f. Caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III had appointed him after his predecessor was convicted of fraud. Although Qāsim was assassinated as early as 332/944, the high standard of coins he had introduced remained associated with his name in the following period. Subsequent Arab chroniclers such as Ibn ʿIḏārī and al-Maqqarī recorded large amounts of money under the name darāhim qāsimiyya. The average weight of a dirham increased from 2.83 g under Caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III (dec. 350/961) to 3.11 g under Hišām II (366-399/976-1009). They had a silver content of up to 75%.⁹ Miles, The Coinage, pp. 91f.

Compared to the qāsimī dirhams, with up to three times more weight and a high silver content, the local denarii were probably not very attractive. Besides these two coins, however, there was probably no third silver currency in Barcelona. We can therefore surmise that the exarachellos were nothing else than qāsimī dirhams under a different name. How did this name arise?¹⁰At this point it has to be emphasized that the present article does not deal with real coins as objects of numismatics. It is a philological study on the origin and application of certain names and nicknames given to dirham coins in al-Andalus and Barcelona in the 10th century.

2. The nickname of a coin

The ending -ello refers to a Romanic diminutive. Although corresponding word formations are attested for tenth-century Barcelona (e.g., the place name Lubricatello),¹¹ Feliu i Montfort & Salrach i Marés, Els Pergamins, nos 16 (Lobregadelo, 995), 64 (Lubrigadello, 1002) and 235 (Lubricatello, 1034). a local origin cannot be assumed here, as the noun exarach obviously does not have a Latin root. Since we suspect Andalusian dirhams behind the exarachellos, we have to examine the possibility of an Arabic origin.

Under this assumption, the initial vowel “e” could represent the assimilated Arabic article “al-”, especially since one of our three relevant documents reproduces the word in question in the form axarachello.¹² Fàbrega i Grau, Diplomatari, no. 181 (988): exarachellos XII de argento; in the original parchment (Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Perg. 1-2-139): axarachellos XII de argento. The Arabic basic noun would therefore be hidden behind the transliteration xarach. In the documents of tenth-century Barcelona, the Latin letter “x” could be used to reproduce the phoneme š, which does not exist in Latin.¹³Besides its use in genuine Latin words like “exarator”, “exinde” or “exio”. This is well documented for the vernacular name of the hoe, which was called “exada” in many medieval wills. Today’s Catalan orthography prescribes the form “aixada”; the pronunciation was probably “ešada” as early as the 10th century.¹⁴In the Cartulario de Sant Cugat alone, there are five entries of “exades” from the 10th century: Rius Serra, Cartulario, nos 30 (949), 72 (964), 78 (965), 108 (975) and 188 (986).

We therefore recognize, behind the Latin transliteration xarach, the Arabic radicals š-r-q.¹⁵As early as 1941, the Finnish Hispanist Eero K. Neuvonen interpreted the word exarachello as a Mozarabic formation from an Arabic noun and a Romanic ending. However, he interprets the third radical as kāf instead of qāf and reads the Arabic word as al-šarak (ألشرك) = ‘parte’: Neuvonen, Los arabismos, p. 80f. This interpretation is not convincing, especially since al-šarak does not mean part, but noose, trap or net. See also García González, “Una perspectiva”, pp. 539 and 541. The basic meaning of the verb شرق (šaraqa) is shine, radiate, glare. Derivatives include šurūq (rising of the sun, moon and stars) and mašriq (East/Orient). With reference to the dirham, one could assume that this word alluded to the silver-light shine (al-šaraq) of the coin. A comparable denomination can be found in 18th and 19th-century England. Here gold and silver coins such as the Sovereign were nicknamed “shiners” in popular slang, alluding to their metallic shine.¹⁶ Schwabe, “Germanic”, p. 169; Frey, A Dictionary, p. 218 with references.

Abū Nuwās (dec. 200/815), court poet of the Caliph of Baghdad Hārūn al-Rašīd, testifies that dirhams could be described as shiny in the Arab world of the Middle Ages as well. In a riddle poem, he pretends to describe a hunting falcon. However, various properties ascribed to the bird, such as small, round, white, shining and radiant, would be more suitable for a dirham. Furthermore, a dirham would be able to help the poor, hardly so a falcon. It has also been well observed that a silver coin shines brightest shortly after minting (“one month old”) and only emits noise when thrown:

In classical Arabic legal literature, a distinction is made between “white” and “black” dirhams, which obviously related to the different silver content of the coins.¹⁸ Udovitch, Partnership, p. 56f.; See also Goitein, “The Exchange Rate”, pp. 36-38, on white silver pieces in the commercial letters of the Cairo Geniza. Accordingly, high-quality dirhams were described as “white”, an epithet echoed by Abū Nuwās.

But how did the Arabic word al-šaraq get its Romanic ending? The existence of hybrid Arabic-Romanic words is well attested for Al-Andalus in the so-called ḫarǧas (ḫaraǧāt) of the 11th and 12th centuries. Ḫarǧas are final stanzas of a certain genre of poems, the muwaššaḥāt, that were written in classical Arabic or Hebrew. Apparently to express common touch, the ḫarǧas switched to vernacular at the end of the muwaššaḥāt. There are ḫarǧas in Andalusi-Arabic dialect, others used the Hispanic-Romanic vernacular.¹⁹For the transmission of the ḫarǧas, see Cenname, Las jarchas, pp. 16-19: List of the manuscripts, pp. 244-314: Photographs of the manuscripts. Ḫarǧas editions in Corriente, “The Kharjas”, pp. 120-124 (from Arabic manuscripts), pp. 125-127 (from Hebrew manuscripts). Further sources for hybrid Arabic-Romanic formations in botanical, agronomic and medical dictionaries, see Corriente, Romania arabica, pp. 101-104. The Romanic ḫarǧas in turn incorporated individual Arabic words as well as hybrid words, which were made up of an Arabic root word and a Romanic suffix. A commonly used suffix for nouns was -ello.²⁰ Corriente, “El idiolecto”, p. 13f., note 36; Corriente, Romania arabica, pp. 131 and 134. The following ḫarǧa, inserted at the end of a Hebrew muwaššaḥ by the famous poet Yehuda Halevi (dec. 1141), serves as an example, with the Romanic components put in capital letters and the Arabic ones in lower case:

In this example, the Arabic word for “master”, sīd, had the suffix -ello added (meaning ‘dear master’). Such hybrid words are likely to have been formed frequently in the largely bilingual population of Al-Andalus, and some of them found their way into the ḫarǧa poems.

The word *al-šaraq-ello could therefore interpreted as a hybrid form that was used to designate the dirhams in al-Andalus. Following the example of the English slang name from the 18th century, we may translate *al-šaraq-ellos as ‘little shiners’. This nickname made its way -apparently together with the dirhams- from al-Andalus to Barcelona, where it was finally adopted as exarachello into the local Latin documents. However, the name could not be read from the coin, it must have been passed on orally when the coins were handed over. Where and by whom this transmission took place remains unknown due to lack of sources. The assumption that traders from al-Andalus came to Barcelona paying their trading partners with dirhams under the name *al-šaraq-ellos seems enticing, but cannot be proven. It is equally possible that Catalan mercenaries serving in Al-Andalus received those dirhams in pay.²²For the mercenary thesis, see Bonnassie, La Catalogne, pp. 347, 423-425, 432f. Both traders and military leaders could have used and passed on the nickname.

3. Conclusions

At the turn of the 11th century, dirhams from Al-Andalus circulating in Barcelona were either called caceminos or exarachellos. While the term cacemino was borrowed from the “official” Andalusian denomination of the dirham, dirham qāsimī, the term exarachello can be identified as an Andalusian nickname of the same coin.²³As far as I know, the reconstructed word *al-šaraq-ello has not been found in Arabic literature. Both designations, cacemino and exarachello, must have been transmitted orally from Al-Andalus to Barcelona, although details of the relevant contacts are not known to us. Different ways of transmission may have led to the use of the different names.²⁴The two names seem to have been linked to different dimensions of the amounts accounted for: the modest 3, 11 and 12 exarachellos (986-1009) contrast sharply with the higher sums of 150 to 5,000 caceminos (ten documents from the years 1016-1041), with the exception of 5 caceminos only in one early document from 981, see Bonnassie, La Catalogne, p. 385.

Since most documents from Barcelona were destroyed during the looting of the city by the troops of the Andalusi ḥāǧib al-Manṣūr in 985,²⁵ Bonnassie, La Catalogne, pp. 28f.; Ballestín Navarro, Almansor, pp. 92f. we cannot expect to find much written evidence of dirhams from the preceding decades.²⁶The only exception are the five caceminos in the document from the monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallés from the year 981, Rius Serra, Cartulario, no. 136. Under these circumstances, the three documents from the years 986, 988 and 1009 probably represent the final phase of a longer period during which Andalusian dirhams were known in Barcelona under the nickname exarachellos. The mere reception of this Arabic name in the local Latin documents presupposes a certain duration of the relevant contacts with Al-Andalus.

After 1009, the name exarachello disappears from the documents, whereas the last payment in caceminos is attested for 1041.²⁷Last mention of caceminos in a will from 1087, Baucells et al., Diplomatari, no. 1475. The main reason behind this extinction probably lies in the massive influx of the Andalusian gold dinars. Mentioned for the first time in a local document in 978, these coins, called mancusos de auro cocto, came to dominate monetary transactions in Barcelona ever more in the following decades. In the 1020s, Barcelona even started minting its own gold mancusos.²⁸ Bonnassie, La Catalogne, pp. 372-376, 379-382; Balaguer, Història, pp. 52f., 70-72. This “gold fever” seems to have gradually superseded the use of the silver dirham together with its nickname.