Latest / Aurangzeb: The Emperor Who Expanded and Broke the Mughal Empire — Fexingo History / Aurangzeb's Deccan Coin War
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Aurangzeb's Deccan campaigns — the long war, the sieges, the executions. But there's this one overlooked piece: the money that paid for it all, and how it almost backfired. Luna: You mean the coins themselves? Lucas: Exactly. By the 1690s, Aurangzeb was running a war that sucked up an unbelievable amount of silver and copper. The Mughal state minted millions of rupees and copper dams every year just to pay troops, buy supplies, bribe local chiefs. And at the center of that operation was a man named Muhammad Arif. Luna: Was he a treasurer or something? Lucas: More than that. He was Aurangzeb's mintmaster — but not at a fixed mint in Delhi or Lahore. He ran what's called the 'mobile mint.' Picture this: a whole workshop of furnaces, dies, balances, and clerks packed onto carts and camels, following the imperial camp as it moved across the Deccan. When the army stopped, the mint set up and started striking coins. Lucas: Aurangzeb needed a constant supply of fresh coinage because the Marathas were doing something clever: they were melting down Mughal rupees and re-striking them with their own legends, often invoking Sambhaji or Rajaram. So every silver rupee the Mughals paid out could end up funding the enemy. Luna: That's ironic — they're literally minting their own enemy's money. Lucas: Right. And it got worse. The Marathas didn't just melt coins; they started producing counterfeits — crude copper dams that looked Mughal but had less metal, allowing them to buy grain and pay troops on the cheap. Mughal merchants began refusing coins stamped with certain mint marks, and the whole financial system in the Deccan started to fray. Lucas: Muhammad Arif's job was to maintain the purity and weight of the imperial coinage, but as the war dragged on, the silver supply from Central Asia and the Americas started to dry up. Aurangzeb's mints were debasing the coins — less silver, more alloy — and the army's pay lost value. Soldiers mutinied, desertions spiked. Luna: So the currency war was actually hurting the Mughals more than the Marathas? Lucas: That's the argument. The Marathas had a decentralized economy — they could trade in grain, cattle, looted goods. But the Mughal war machine ran on silver. When the silver got scarce, the whole machine stalled. There's a famous hoard found in a well near Bijapur in the 19th century — hundreds of thousands of copper dams from exactly this period, buried by a merchant fleeing Maratha raids. Numismatists studied them and found that the coins from the mobile mint were significantly lighter than the earlier Delhi issues. Luna: And Muhammad Arif — what happened to him? Lucas: He died in the camp in 1698, likely from exhaustion or disease. His son took over the mobile mint, but by then the war was unwinnable. Aurangzeb never left the Deccan, and his empire never recovered its economic footing. The currency war is a perfect microcosm of the whole conflict: the emperor threw everything into crushing the Marathas, but the very means he used ended up empowering them. Lucas: And here's something that sticks with me — a lot of the Maratha counterstrikes from the 1690s bear a simple legend: 'Shri Raja Shivaji' or 'Shri Sambhaji'. They took the Mughal emperor's name off the coin and replaced it with the names of his enemies. Every transaction was a tiny act of rebellion. Luna: That's almost poetic — the coins themselves became propaganda. Lucas: Yeah. And it's a reminder that history isn't just battles and treaties. It's also about how people move metal around. A few of our listeners have told us they really like these deeper dives into the stuff that sustained these empires. Luna: Yeah, the material conditions — it makes the whole thing feel more real. Lucas: Well, and this show is only possible because of those listeners — the ones who chip in a little to keep it ad-free. There's a small group on buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making deep dives like this one. So if you've been following along episode to episode, that's the engine. Luna: It's nice that it's listener-supported, keeps it honest. Lucas: Anyway — back to Muhammad Arif. His son, also named Muhammad Arif, tried to keep the mobile mint going after his father's death, but by 1705 the mint was striking coins so debased that the army refused them. The emperor had to order a new shipment of silver from Surat, but the Marathas intercepted it. Luna: So the mobile mint literally ran out of metal? Lucas: Exactly. And that's when Aurangzeb started issuing these emergency copper coins with no mint name — just the kalima and the regnal year. They were almost impossible to counterfeit because they were so crudely made, but they also had almost no purchasing power. The Deccan economy was bartering by then. Lucas: There's a letter from a Mughal officer in 1706 complaining that his soldiers were being paid in these 'worthless copper pieces' and that they were selling their weapons just to buy grain. The empire was literally eating itself. Luna: And the Marathas were just watching it collapse. Lucas: Watching and profiting. By the time Aurangzeb died in 1707, the Maratha state had its own vibrant currency system based on the same Mughal weight standards, but with their own iconography. The 'Chhatrapati' coins became a symbol of sovereignty. So in a way, the currency war ended with the Marathas winning not just the battle for independence, but for economic legitimacy. Luna: That's a pretty complete reversal. Lucas: It is. And it all started with a mintmaster and his mobile furnaces, trying to keep an empire's war machine fed with silver that just wasn't there anymore.