The famous Jem Sultan Collection of Turkish coins has been donated to the American Numismatic Society by Olivia Garvey Lincoln. The original collection, well-known to specialists through its luxurious publication 20 years ago, includes 4,489 coins, sealings, and medals, to which 1,112 coins and medals have been added by Mrs. Lincoln. Together with our previous holdings of Ottoman and Republic of Turkey material, the ANS now has 10,889 Turkish coins, medals, tokens, and paper money. This must be the largest and most representative Turkish numismatic collection outside Turkey itself, and constitutes a precious resource for scholars of Turkish history, art, and culture.
This magnificent gift was arranged through the good offices of ANS Fellow Kenneth M. MacKenzie, a long-time volunteer worker on the Society's Ottoman coins. MacKenzie consulted with Mrs. Lincoln and her husband George to build up the collection after their purchase, particularly as regards gold coinage, and advised them when the time came to dispose of it.
Along with the Turkish coins, Mrs. Lincoln donated another collection of more than 7,000 coins of India and its neighbors from ancient times to the present. The latter collection, which remains to be fully catalogued, will constitute an important addition to the Society's 60,000 Indian coins, bringing many new varieties.
MacKenzie travelled to wintry Lincoln, Nebraska, in late January to organize the collection and make a preliminary inventory. He was joined there by ANS Curator of Islamic Coins Dr. Michael L. Bates to complete the paperwork and pack the coins for shipment to the Society. The collection was brought to New York by U.S. Art, specialists in the transport of art objects.
The Jem Sultan collection was formed by William D. Holberton, who died in 1995, and purchased by the Lincolns in the 1970s. For some years it was on deposit in the Sheldon Art Museum in Lincoln where it was used for research and teaching under the supervision of the Rev. Iain G.C. Campbell. After he sold the collection, Holberton put together his two-volume catalogue of the collection, published under the nom de plume of Jem Sultan, Coins of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic: A Detailed Catalogue of the Jem Sultan Collection (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1977; now out of print). A brief biography of Holberton by MacKenzie will be found in Numismatics International Bulletin for September 1996, pp. 200-2.
The supplementary coins added by the Lincolns after their purchase of the original Jem Sultan collection include many rarities, and proportionately many more gold coins. About 150 zer-i mahbub gold coins acquired indirectly from the collection of Samuel Lachman include most of those discussed in his 1977 ANS Museum Notes article "The Initial Letters on Ottoman Coins of the Eighteenth Century." Also included with the collection is a "shipwreck hoard" of 369 Ottoman gold coins: the provenance and precise contents remain to be studied.
The Ottoman Empire
Jem Sultan was the son of the Ottoman sultan Muhammad II (1444- 81). When his father died, rebels in Istanbul eliminated the wazir and put Jem's brother Bayezid II on the throne, but Jem, then a provincial governor, nevertheless claimed the sultanate he had expected to receive and took control of Bursa where silver aqches with his name were issued. These are among the rarest of all Ottoman coins. Although Jem lost the brief war for the sultanate in 1481, he escaped and maintained his claim from exile, finding sanctuary with the Mamluks of Egypt, the Knights of St. John of Rhodes, and the Pope in Rome, who hoped to use him as figurehead for a crusade against the Ottomans. He was finally turned over to Charles VIII of France and died in his custody in 1495.
The Ottoman dynasty takes its name from the first prince (they acquired the grander title sultan later) `Uthman, whose name has been distorted in various languages as Osman and the like, leading to Ottoman in English. Their coinage begins in the reign of the second prince Urkhan (in modern Turkish Orhan), who ruled from 1324 to 1362 in western Anatolia with his capital at Bursa at the southeastern corner of the Sea of Marmora. His coinage, like that of other princes of the region, consisted of silver aqches ("little whites," small coins descended from the Ilkhan dirham) and copper manghirs ("coppers"). Both these moneys continued to be the bulk of Ottoman coinage until the seventeenth century. In 1453, the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople, and in 1477 their mint there began the issue of the gold altin ("gold coin"), with the same weight and fineness as the Mamluk ashrafi and the Venetian ducat. The altin formed the third element of the coinage, surviving with its full weight and purity until the nineteenth century. The aqche was the mainstay of the system, but in the seventeenth century its debasement began, leading the sultan Sulayman II, in 1687, to introduce a large silver coin like the dollars of Europe which was called ghurush (modern orthography kurus), a transcription of the German groschen. In Arabic this word became qirsh or 'irsh, a denomination still in use today; in European languages the coins were called piastres, from the Italian piastra meaning "slab." This is another denomination name that has survived as a coin name into our own time. These large coins were manufactured with new man-powered mint machinery, the use of which was extended to other coins as well during the eighteenth century. It was hoped that good large Turkish silver coins would drive European dollars out of circulation in the empire, but this happened only in limited areas. In 1844, the monetary system was regularized on the basis of a gold lira equivalent to 100 silver kurus. These coins remained stable until 1922.
The Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent stretched from the frontier of Morocco around the Mediterranean and up to Budapest, and in the south to Aden and Basra. No empire of that size ever had a uniform centralized currency. Regional currencies, albeit with the name and official inscriptions of the sultans, were issued in eastern Anatolia along the Iranian frontier, in Iraq, in Egypt, in Libya, Tunis, and Algeria, and in Yemen. All these countries are well represented in the Jem Sultan collection and its supplements, as well as the coinage of the central lands in the Balkans and western Anatolia. The collection also includes a comprehensive array of the coins of the Turkish Republic beginning in 1922. In the nineteenth century, the Empire began to issue medals, which are included in the Jem Sultan collection as well as European medals with Turkish subjects.
The Indian Collection
Little can be said about the approximately 7,000 coins of India and its neighbors until the collection is unpacked and sorted. A quick survey before it was packed in Nebraska suggested that the collection is broadly representative of India's coinage at all periods, with numerous examples of certain series that will be of great use for specialist studies. Coins of Col. Biddulph, the well-known collector of the turn of the century, are included, to be added to those coins from his collection already in the ANS. Volunteer help in identifying, sorting, and organizing this Indian material is urgently needed.
There is no silver lining without a cloud. To make the two Lincoln collections available for study as soon as possible will take someone's full-time work for at least a year. Ideally, perhaps funds can be found to support a temporary curatorial assistant for South Asian coins to see to the processing and integration of the new Indian collection, and maybe as well for a fellow or assistant to explore and publish the treasures of the unpublished material that has been added to the Jem Sultan collection. The help and advice of members with expertise in either field will be most welcome.
