The Story of the Maria Theresia Thaler
Clara Semple 2005
Barzan Publishing House

Incredibly a connection exists between late 20th century head-hunters in Borneo paying blood money to their victim’s relatives and a remarkably able and philoprogenitive 18th century Hapsburg Empress. That connection is a rather beautiful silver coin - the Maria Theresa thaler. The Maria Theresa thaler became, over two and a half centuries, an official and de facto currency as well as an integral part of the social and trading history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and points east across India and Pakistan into Indonesia.

Clara Semple’s intriguing new book on the origins, trading life and legend of this iconic coin, bearing the image of a long-dead empress, presents years of research and intellectual rigor in an eminently readable form. Beautifully produced in hardback and illustrated in full color by the Anglo-Arab publishing house, Barzan Press, it is a fascinating insight into the history of a coin and the societies that refused to let it die.

Semple traces the rise of the coin from its first appearance as legal currency in Austria 1741 with the image of the young empress up to her death in 1780. During this period the thaler was widely circulated through her domains and beyond. It was when she died in 1780 that the coin, until then legal currency, took on a second life. The new emperor, her son Joseph, allowed minting of the coin with the image of his mother on the obverse with the date frozen at 1780.

The story of the thaler begins much earlier than the 18th century, however - with the first voyages of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries. Merchants found that the peoples they wanted to trade with demanded silver bullion in exchange for their goods. The Spanish, with their Potosi silver mine in Bolivia, had a lead on the rest of the old world. Spanish silver dollars or reales - first minted in 1497 - were produced in assorted denominations, including one for eight reals, the famed ‘pieces of eight’ immortalized by Long John Silver’s parrot and beloved of pirates. By 1536 Spanish silver coins had developed a second form which bore the image of two pillars entwined in a ’s’ shape in a brassard bearing the logo “ne plus ultra.” It was probably this which gave rise to the dollar sign - $. In the 16th century, a Bohemian nobleman discovered huge deposits of silver in the valley of St Joachimsthal. He obtained permission to mint coins which became known as  Joachimsthalers - or colloquially “thalers” from the German for valley - “thal.”

As the coins spread throughout Europe, the name changed according to local languages. The Dutch called them daler, the Swedish daalders and the English dollars.

When the Maria Theresa thaler came on the scene, the image of the young empress added value to the coin. The Austrian thaler had a very precise (83.3 percent) and invariable silver content and was, with the technology of the times, impossible to forge unless you had a mint. Later in its history, and after it ceased to be a currency in 1858, the thaler was minted as far away as Birmingham and Bombay, much to the annoyance of the Austrian mint. The easily identifiable marks of authenticity - the nine pearls in the brooch on her shoulder, for example - encouraged merchants and traders to take thalers as payment over other coins.

The striking coin, with its utterly reliable silver content, made a good source of bullion for the jewelry worn by women in the MENA countries.

Largely due to the coffee trade that was developing rapidly at that time in the countries bordering the Red Sea, it represented portable wealth and security. The coins were also worn as jewelry.

It was this last aspect of the thaler that attracted Semple to the coin.  She is an artist who spent many years recording the friezes and pottery in archaeological sites on the Nile living, as she said in Jeddah last week, “in wondrous splendor on a houseboat and, for a period, actually in the temple at Karnak.” Her particular skill was to reconstruct images of whole artifacts from pieces found during digs.

Having discovered the coin, Semple acted to record the story of the thaler. “It needed to be done immediately because the coin was finally on its way out here,” she said. “Another generation won’t know it.” Her eye for detail was drawn to the intricacy of the engraving on the thaler and the intriguing manner in which, what at base was a currency, refused to disappear because of the artistry with which it was made.

The common thread in Semple’s investigation of the thaler is jewelry. The frequently recurring icon of the magnificent Maria Theresa triggered her interest and slowly developed into a passion for the coin. “I lived in fear of expert coin collectors,” she said, “but wanted to write a book that was readable and authoritative.” She has succeeded.

Packed with anecdote, substantially referenced, usefully indexed and liberally illustrated, Semple has produced what promises to become a standard work for the general reader on the thaler. Anyone with an interest in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia should read it, if not for the erudition, then for the accompanying insights into the culture and society.