maravedí

The Almoravids were a Berber confederation from the western Sahara who rose to power in the 1040s under the preacher Abdallah ibn Yasin. Their Arabic name, al-Murābiṭūn, derived from "ribāṭ," a fortified monastery or garrison post, and they understood themselves as warriors bound to such a place. When they minted gold dinars in their capital of Marrakech from the 1070s onward, those coins were stamped "Murābiṭī," meaning of the Almoravids.

The Almoravid dinar weighed roughly 4.0 grams of fine gold and circulated from the Senegal River to the Ebro. Christian kingdoms in Iberia prized these coins and paid tributes, ransoms, and trade debts in them. As the Almoravid empire weakened in the 1140s and the Almohads displaced them, the coins kept circulating under a Spanish rendering that Castilian scribes in Toledo wrote as they heard it from bilingual traders: "maravedí."

By the mid-12th century, "maravedí" had detached entirely from the Almoravids and become a generic unit of account in Castile. Alfonso VIII struck new maravedís in gold, then silver, then base copper across the 12th and 13th centuries, always keeping the name but rarely the original purity. By the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 15th century, the maravedí was worth so little that Spanish writers used it as the stock example of a sum too small to matter.

Columbus's 1492 voyage was priced in maravedís: his sailors earned 667 maravedís a month, and the total enterprise cost roughly two million. The coin crossed the Atlantic as a unit of accounting even as it nearly vanished from everyday commerce. Spain abolished the maravedí by royal decree in 1848, ending eight centuries of a coin whose name outlasted the dynasty that first struck it.