The Dirham Road

A field on Gotland

On 16 July 1999 two archaeologists were walking a field at Spillings farm, in the parish of Othem on northern Gotland, with a metal detector. A television crew filming a feature on the site had just packed up and left. Within twenty minutes the detector picked up a strong signal; a few hours later, a few metres away, it registered a second one so strong that the display read "overload" and switched itself off.

Beneath the plough soil lay two deposits of silver weighing some 67 kilograms in total, together with a third cache of more than 20 kilograms of bronze scrap. The silver included arm-rings, ingots and 14,295 coins, nearly all of them Islamic dirhams. The youngest coin was struck in 870/871, so the hoard was hidden at some point after that — beneath the floor of a building without a hearth, perhaps a storehouse. It remains the largest known silver hoard of the Viking Age and is now displayed at the Gotland Museum in Visby.

Spillings is exceptional in size, not in kind. Gotland alone has produced several hundred hoards containing dirhams, and similar finds stretch from the British Isles across Scandinavia and the southern Baltic to the Middle Volga. How many coins this represents depends on what is counted. The historian Marek Jankowiak puts the number recovered in northern Europe over the last two centuries at around 400,000 — "only a fraction of the original inflow of millions, if not tens of millions". The semiotician Manar Hammad has counted almost 500,000 dirhams in Scandinavian collections, though Hammad himself, as the volume's editors note, presents his analysis as a hypothetical construction still to be tested against archaeological and historical data. The Oslo numismatist Svein H. Gullbekk has suggested that "perhaps a billion" dirhams flowed towards Scandinavia and the Viking world between 800 and 950 — an extrapolation, not a count.

Whatever the true figure, the pattern is not in doubt. For roughly two centuries, silver coined in the Islamic world travelled thousands of kilometres north and west, and much of it ended up in the ground around the Baltic. This piece follows that silver: where it came from, the rhythms in which it arrived, what may have been given in exchange, and what its disappearance might have meant for the societies that had come to depend on it.

Where the silver came from

In the eighth to tenth centuries the Islamic world minted silver on a scale no Latin Christian ruler could match. Western Europe was not without silver — the Carolingian mint at Melle in Poitou drew on local mines — but the great sources lay further east, in the mining regions of Central Asia and the Hindu Kush.

The Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, and from the 890s the Samanid amirs ruling from Bukhara over Transoxiana and Khurasan, turned this silver into the dirham: a thin coin around 25 mm across and weighing about three grams, inscribed on both faces in Arabic with religious formulae, the ruler's name, the mint and the year. Within the caliphate it was money in the ordinary sense. In the north, as we shall see, it was mostly treated as silver by weight — cut, tested and weighed on folding scales.

Five phases of silver

Dirhams did not reach the north in a steady stream. The American historian Thomas S. Noonan, whose hoard catalogues remain the foundation of the field, reconstructed a sequence of surges and slumps; Roman K. Kovalev and Marek Jankowiak have since refined it.

I. Beginnings, c. 780–820

The earliest dirham hoard in northern Russia, found at Staraya Ladoga on the Volkhov river south of Lake Ladoga, has a latest coin of 786/787. Ladoga itself had been founded no later than 753, according to tree-ring dates from its earliest buildings, and from early on it appears to have been home to Scandinavians, Finnic speakers and Slavs alike. Silver seems to have reached it via the Caucasus and the Khazar khaganate on the lower Volga. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard have argued that access to silver from the Islamic world was central to Ladoga's early importance.

II. A first slowdown, 820s–840s

New coins became scarcer in Eastern European hoards, which Noonan linked to reduced minting within the caliphate itself. Here the picture has recently changed. Lead-isotope analysis by Jane Kershaw and colleagues suggests that dirhams were in fact reaching the central Baltic in significant numbers before c. 850, but were routinely melted down and recast as ornaments — so the hoards understate early imports.

III. The Abbasid peak, 860s–early 870s

This is the horizon to which Spillings belongs, and hoards of the period are unusually concentrated on Gotland. The Rus' Primary Chronicle — compiled in Kyiv in the early twelfth century — places the arrival of the Scandinavian leader Riurik among the northern peoples in 862. It is tempting to connect the two, and some scholars have. But the Chronicle's ninth-century chronology was reconstructed long after the events, and the connection remains an inference.

IV. The first silver crisis, c. 875–900

In hoards from the Dnieper to Sweden and Poland, coins struck after the 870s almost vanish, although dirhams continued to be minted and hoarded in the Near East. Noonan interpreted this as a break somewhere along the route — in the Khazar lands, or within the network of Rus' trading settlements — rather than a failure of supply. Its cause is still unknown.

V. The Samanid flood, c. 900–950s

The largest wave came from Central Asia. After Ismaʿil ibn Ahmad consolidated Samanid rule in the 890s, the mints of Samarqand, al-Shash (Tashkent) and Bukhara poured out silver. In a study of 634 hoards, Kovalev found that 94 per cent of the hoards containing Samarqand dirhams, and nearly 97 per cent of the coins, were found in northern Europe. He concluded that "the Samanid dirham was primarily an export coin".

Extrapolating from the surviving hoards, Noonan projected that some 125 million whole Samanid dirhams reached northern Europe in the tenth century — on average about 1.25 million a year (Noonan 2000–01, as cited by Kovalev 2002).

By this time the main route ran up the Volga. Silver passed through Khwarazm and the trading town of Bulghar, near the confluence of the Volga and the Kama, the centre of the Volga Bulghars. From there it moved north-west by river and portage towards Lake Ilmen, the Volkhov, Ladoga and the Baltic. Arabic writers called the Bulghar ruler "king of the Ṣaqāliba" — a term Arab geographers applied loosely to the peoples of northern and eastern Europe, and which in some contexts, notably in al-Andalus, came to denote slaves of European origin.

What was the silver paid for?

The Arabic geographers give us the outline. Ibn Khurradadhbih, a senior official of the Abbasid postal and intelligence service writing in the ninth century, describes Rus' merchants carrying beaver and black-fox furs and swords from the far reaches of the Slavic lands, sometimes travelling on to Baghdad, where Slavic servants interpreted for them. Ibn Rusta, writing in the early tenth century, says that the Rus' raid the Ṣaqāliba by boat, take captives and sell them at Khazaran and Bulghar.

The most vivid testimony comes from Ibn Faḍlān, secretary of the embassy sent by the caliph al-Muqtadir to the ruler of the Volga Bulghars in 921–922. He watched a Rus' merchant make offerings to a wooden figure and pray for a buyer:

“

Lord, I have come from a distant land, bringing so many slave-girls <priced at> such and such per head and so many sables <priced at> such and such per pelt.

Ibn Faḍlān also noted that Rus' women wore neck-bands of gold and silver: whenever a man's wealth reached ten thousand dirhams, he had a band made for his wife, and another for every further ten thousand. Silver, in other words, was not only a means of exchange but a way of displaying a household's wealth on the body.

Furs, wax, honey, amber and swords were all part of this trade. The question is which commodity drove it.

The Dirhams for Slaves project at Oxford's Khalili Research Centre explored the hypothesis that captives — mainly Slavs — were the principal commodity. Jankowiak argues that the distribution of dirham hoards is hard to explain by the fur trade alone, and that the slave trade was the main stimulus behind the movement of silver northwards. Other historians and numismatists, including James Howard-Johnston and Kovalev himself, have emphasised furs as the north's principal export, and a 2024 article by Johan Callmer, Ingrid Gustin and Mats Roslund in Medieval Archaeology insists that dirhams are not unequivocal proof of slave trading, arguing for the primacy of fur hunting in drawing Scandinavians eastwards. Most specialists would accept that both trades mattered; the disagreement is about proportion, and the balance may have shifted over time.

What is not in doubt is that people were bought and sold along these routes, and that some of the silver in Baltic hoards was the price of human beings. That is reason enough to look at a dirham with something other than admiration.

The silver crisis

From the mid-tenth century the flow faltered again, and this time it did not recover. Noonan's hoard figures, as summarised by Kovalev, show that the 940s–970s account for 32 per cent of the century's dirham trade and the 980s–990s for just 5.4 per cent; in the 980s alone the volume fell by 57.3 per cent compared with the 970s. Hoard statistics can mislead, since coins were melted down and re-used — the point made by the analyses of Kershaw and colleagues (2021).

Several explanations have been offered. They are not mutually exclusive.

• Exhaustion of supply. Noonan argued that the Central Asian silver supply itself began to run short. Kovalev puts it more pointedly: by the 950s the Samanids "had simply drained their silver resources" — in part by exporting so much of it north.
• Debasement. From about 943, Samanid dirhams contained less silver. Northern users, who tested coins by nicking and cutting them, may have been less willing to accept them.
• Samanid decline. Loss of provinces, agricultural crisis and repeated rebellions reduced the revenues that fed the mints.
• Conquest. The Turkic Qarakhanids took Bukhara in 999, and the Samanid state was extinguished soon afterwards.

Dirhams continued to trickle into Eastern Europe into the early eleventh century.

What did it mean for Rus'?

Here we move from evidence to argument, and it is worth being clear where the line falls.

Many historians see long-distance trade as a key force in the formation of the earliest Rus' polities. Silver allowed leaders to reward armed followers — the retinue later known as the druzhina — who in turn protected routes, collected tribute in furs and captives, and escorted it south. Jankowiak goes further, arguing that the Scandinavian appetite for silver drew them into the slave trade, which encouraged warrior groups to organise and compete for captives.

Ibn Faḍlān was told that the "king of the Rūs" kept four hundred of his bravest and most trusted companions with him in his palace, each attended by slave-girls. The report is second-hand, and we cannot be sure which ruler or which centre it describes. But it shows what such power looked like to an outside observer: a large, permanently maintained following, which only a steady income could support.

The Rus' also had dealings with Byzantium long before the dirham supply failed. Treaties of 911 and 944, preserved in the Primary Chronicle, regulate the status of Rus' merchants in Constantinople; an earlier agreement dated 907 survives only in the Chronicle and its authenticity is debated. Rus' and Scandinavian warriors served the Byzantine emperors as mercenaries. In 988, by the traditional date, Volodimer (Vladimir) Sviatoslavich, prince of Kyiv, accepted Christianity from Byzantium and married the emperor's sister Anna; the Primary Chronicle places his baptism at Cherson in the Crimea, although other early traditions disagree on the place.

It is worth asking whether the decline of Central Asian silver made Byzantium — with its gold, silk, markets and military service — relatively more important to the rulers of Kyiv in the later tenth century, and whether that made a Byzantine alliance, and the conversion that came with it, more attractive. We think this is a reasonable question. It is not an explanation. Volodimer's conversion has been read in political, dynastic, military and religious terms, and the economic context is one strand among them. The chronology alone warns against a simple causal story: Byzantine ties were already well established while the dirhams were at their height.

Hammad has argued that in Scandinavia, by the eleventh century, land rather than silver became the main medium of power and status. Whether a comparable shift — from mobile silver to revenues from land and lordship — took place in Rus', and when, is a separate and open question.

In Scandinavia, at least, the change is visible in the ground. German and Anglo-Saxon pennies replaced dirhams in late tenth- and eleventh-century hoards. Birka, the great trading town on Lake Mälaren, was abandoned around the 970s; Hedeby survived until the mid-eleventh century. Gotland remained a trading hub, but the age of Islamic silver in the north was over.

A coin in the hand

Look at a Samanid dirham in a museum case — in the Gotland Museum in Visby, the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm or the Hermitage in St Petersburg — and you are looking at something that crossed several worlds. A coin struck in Samarqand in the reign of Nasr II might have passed through Khwarazm and Bulghar, been tested with a knife-point by a merchant on the Volkhov, crossed the Baltic, been cut in half and weighed on a pair of folding scales, and paid for amber, a sword — or a person. Then someone buried it, and did not come back.

Dirhams are often described as evidence of an early "globalisation". The word is anachronistic, but the point behind it is sound: the tenth-century world was more tightly connected than we usually imagine. What held those connections together was also less comfortable than the image suggests — silver from the mountains of Central Asia, captives and furs from the forests of the north, and the armed traders who learned to turn one into the other.

When the mints of Samarqand fell silent, that system unravelled. Something new took shape in its place — but how directly one led to the other is a question historians are still arguing about.