Algeria

The Ottoman Regency of Algiers minted its own money and kept its own books: a gold sultani, later called the zeri mahbub or sequin, a range of silver pieces including the riyal, the budju and the small pataque chique, and a base-metal asper for daily use, while contracts, rents and pious endowments were normally reckoned in dinars of account quite distinct from the gold coin. Because every mosque, zaouia and marabout in Algiers was supported by habous property, its title deeds, rent rolls and salary schedules were written up by the cadis and kept in rolls; when the French seized the religious foundations after 1830 these passed into the Domaines administration, where a generation of archivists, Albert Devoulx above all, translated and printed them in quantity. The result is unusual for a North African city of the period. One can read not only who paid for a building but what the building paid, month by month, to the preachers, teachers, Qur’an cantors and muezzins who filled it with sound.

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Hassan Pasha’s Endowment for Twelve Qur’an Cantors at the Ketchaoua Mosque 1796

When Hassan Pasha rebuilt the Ketchaoua mosque he tied its upkeep to a habous endowment of city property, and in a cadi’s act of mid-Sha‘ban 1210 (February 1796) he fixed, post by post, what every member of the mosque’s establishment would draw from those rents: twenty silver rial a month to the preacher, one rial to each of the nine muezzins of the chanting platform, and a quarter of a gold dinar a month to each of twelve men retained to chant the Qur’an daily. They read one hizb after the dawn prayer and one after the afternoon prayer, “following the custom which has currency in all the mosques inside the well-guarded city of Algiers,” at a combined charge of thirty-six gold dinars a year against the foundation. The dinar here is a unit of account: Devoulx, publishing the deed from the seized habous archive, values it at 10 livres 2 sols 6 deniers, which at the germinal standard implies about 2.94 g of fine gold, consistent with an Algiers sultani of roughly 3.3 to 3.5 g at about 0.85 fine. The mosque was taken for Catholic worship a few years after the conquest of 1830 and dismantled piece by piece into the cathedral of Algiers, so this deed is now the fullest surviving account of who sang in it and for how much.

~105.8g

Act of the cadi of Algiers, mid-Sha‘ban 1210 AH (21–29 February 1796), habous deed of Hassan Pasha for the Djama Ketchaoua, habous archives of Algiers; Devoulx, Albert. Les édifices religieux de l’ancien Alger. (Alger, 1870), pp. 168–170; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica, digitised copy NUMM-667326 (2026 accessed).