Owner Comments:
Moulay 'Abd Al-Rahman; AH 1238 - 1276, 1822 - 1859 AD
Abd Al-Rahman assumed the Sultanate in 1822, after his uncle died. During his reign, the French began a series of incursions into northern Africa which laid the foundation for the conflicts in Morocco. At this time, they were not yet interested in conquering Morocco. It all began in 1830, when the French invaded Algiers in response to a diplomatic insult. The French began conquering Algeria, which had been ruled by the Ottoman empire for hundreds of years. A resistance leader named Abd al-Qadir began fighting against the French conquest, and as he lost more and more territory he was forced to retreat into eastern Morocco. Sultan Abd al-Rahman had been supporting the resistance fighters. The French found this to be unacceptable, so in 1844 the First Franco-Moroccan War was fought. Tangiers and Mogador were bombarded, and a battle was fought as Isly. Because of these losses, Morocco was forced to sign a peace treaty with France, which ended Moroccan support of the resistance fighters and formally recognized the border between Morocco and Algeria.
This coin is a particularly attractive example, well patinated and fairly high grade. NGC gave it a grade of VF-35, although I think numerical grading on pieces like this is often an exercise in futility. Each individual piece is unique, and so gauging its relative wear is often just guesswork. Compared to many of these, this piece has very little wear (you can see the wear on the high points, such as the date and the circle in the center of the obverse.)