Blood Money — Coins of Assassins, Mercenaries and Outlaws Through History

Every coin tells a story. Some of those stories are dark.

We tend to think of coins as neutral objects — instruments of commerce, tokens of trade, the unremarkable small change of daily life. But coins have always been the medium through which power moves, and power has never been exclusively benign. The same coins that paid for bread and wine also paid for murder, for war, for betrayal, and for the services of men who operated entirely outside the law.

The history of coins used by assassins, mercenaries, pirates, and outlaws is not a footnote to monetary history. It is monetary history — the shadow side of the same story that runs through every mint, every treasury, and every market in the ancient and modern world. Understanding it changes how you look at every coin you hold.

Thirty Pieces of Silver — The Most Famous Blood Money in History

No payment in history is more famous than the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot for the betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether understood as historical fact or as the foundational narrative of Western civilisation, the thirty pieces of silver established the concept of "blood money" — payment for betrayal or killing — so deeply in Western culture that the phrase has never left the language.

The coins themselves have been the subject of scholarly debate for two thousand years. The most likely candidate, based on the historical context of first-century Judaea, is the Tyrian shekel — a large silver coin minted in the Phoenician city of Tyre that was the standard currency accepted for temple tax payments in Jerusalem. Tyrian shekels were among the highest-quality silver coins in circulation in the ancient Near East, containing approximately 94% pure silver and bearing the image of the god Melqart on the obverse.

The irony is significant: the coins most likely used to pay for the betrayal of the founder of Christianity bore the image of a pagan deity, and were the coins specifically required by the Jewish temple authorities for religious payments. Money, as always, moved across religious and moral boundaries with complete indifference.

The phrase "thirty pieces of silver" has entered every European language as a synonym for betrayal purchased with money. It is the original blood money — and it was paid in coins that were, by the standards of their time, entirely ordinary.

The Assassins — A Brotherhood Paid in Gold

The Hashshashin — the original Assassins — were a Nizari Ismaili sect that operated from mountain fortresses in Persia and Syria between the 11th and 13th centuries. Their name entered every European language as the word for a political killer. Their payment was in gold — the Fatimid gold dinar and its successors, the most stable and widely accepted currency in the medieval Islamic world.

The Assassins were not random killers. They were a highly organised political and religious movement that used targeted assassination as a strategic tool — eliminating specific enemies of the Nizari Ismaili cause with surgical precision rather than engaging in open warfare they could not win. Their targets included caliphs, sultans, crusader leaders, and rival religious figures. Their methods were almost always the same: a single killer, a blade, and a willingness to die in the execution of the mission.

The gold coins that funded the Assassin network were the currency of the medieval Islamic world — dinars bearing the names of caliphs and the declarations of faith that marked Islamic coinage from its earliest days. These coins moved through the same trade networks that carried silk, spices, and scholarship across the medieval world. The Assassins' treasury was funded by the same commercial economy that sustained the cities their agents moved through invisibly.

The Mongol destruction of the Assassin stronghold at Alamut in 1256 ended the original brotherhood, but their legend — and the word they gave to every language — has never faded. The gold coins of the medieval Islamic world that paid for their operations are among the most historically significant numismatic objects in existence.

Mercenaries — When War Was a Business Transaction

For most of human history, professional soldiers fought for whoever paid them. The mercenary — the soldier for hire — is as old as coinage itself, and the relationship between the two is not coincidental. The development of coined money in the ancient world made large-scale mercenary warfare possible for the first time, by providing a portable, standardised medium of payment that could be carried across borders and accepted by soldiers of any nationality.

The Greek city-states of the 5th and 4th centuries BC were among the first to employ mercenaries on a large scale, paying them in silver — the Athenian owl tetradrachm, the Corinthian stater, the coins of whatever city happened to be hiring. The Ten Thousand — the Greek mercenary army whose extraordinary march through Persia was recorded by Xenophon in the Anabasis — were paid soldiers fighting for a Persian prince in a dynastic dispute that was none of their concern. Their payment was in Persian gold darics, the most widely accepted currency in the ancient Near East.

The Swiss mercenaries of the 15th and 16th centuries were the most feared professional soldiers in Europe, hired by popes, kings, and city-states across the continent. Their payment was in whatever coin their employer could provide — Venetian ducats, Florentine florins, French livres. The Swiss Confederation grew wealthy on mercenary fees, and the tradition of Swiss military service for foreign powers persisted into the modern era: the Papal Swiss Guard, still protecting the Vatican today, is its last institutional remnant.

The coins that paid mercenaries throughout history were not special coins. They were the ordinary currency of their time and place — the same coins that paid for grain, for cloth, for the construction of cathedrals. What made them blood money was not their metal but their purpose.

Pirates and Privateers — The Coins of the High Seas

The golden age of piracy — roughly 1650 to 1730 — was funded almost entirely by one coin: the Spanish silver real, and its largest denomination, the eight-real piece known as the "piece of eight." This coin, minted from the silver of the Americas at mints in Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí, was the first truly global currency — accepted in every port from the Caribbean to the China Sea. It was also the primary target of every pirate operating in the Atlantic and Pacific during this period.

The Spanish colonial minting system produced coins in enormous quantities — the silver mines of Potosí alone produced an estimated 45,000 tonnes of silver between 1545 and 1800. The coins that emerged from these mints were crudely made by modern standards — hand-struck on irregular blanks, often poorly centred, with designs that varied significantly from coin to coin. They were called cobs or macuquinas, and they were valued by weight rather than by the precision of their striking.

Our Spanish 8 Reales 1731 Piece of Eight Coin is a replica of exactly this coin — the piece of eight that funded the golden age of piracy, that filled the treasure chests of Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts, and that became the template for the US dollar when the new American republic needed a monetary standard. The eight-real piece was so dominant in early American commerce that the US dollar was initially defined as equivalent to the Spanish milled dollar, and Spanish coins remained legal tender in the United States until 1857.

The distinction between pirate and privateer was, in practice, often a matter of paperwork. A privateer held a "letter of marque" — a government licence to attack enemy shipping and keep a share of the proceeds. When the licence expired or the political situation changed, the privateer became a pirate overnight. The coins in their holds were the same either way.

The Brazil 1832 960 Reis in our collection represents the direct successor to this tradition — struck on Spanish colonial silver blanks, the 960 Reis was the Portuguese colonial answer to the piece of eight, produced at a time when the silver trade routes that had funded piracy for two centuries were finally being replaced by modern minting practices.

Outlaws and Highwaymen — Coins as the Currency of Crime

The highwayman — the mounted robber who preyed on travellers and coaches on the roads of 17th and 18th century Britain and Europe — operated in a world where coins were the only form of portable wealth. There were no bank transfers, no credit cards, no digital payments. If you wanted to rob someone, you took their coins. If you wanted to spend what you had stolen, you spent coins. The entire criminal economy of the pre-modern world ran on the same metal as the legitimate one.

The coins that highwaymen stole and spent were the coins of their era — in Britain, the silver shillings, crowns, and guineas of the Stuart and Hanoverian periods. The guinea — a gold coin worth 21 shillings, introduced in 1663 and minted until 1813 — was the preferred denomination of the wealthy, and therefore the preferred target of the highwayman. A single successful robbery might yield dozens of guineas — enough to fund months of comfortable living.

The American outlaw tradition of the 19th century operated on similar principles, but with different coins. The gold and silver coins of the US Mint — double eagles, eagles, half eagles, silver dollars — were the targets of bank robbers, train robbers, and stagecoach bandits from Jesse James to Butch Cassidy. The coins themselves were identical to those in any bank vault or merchant's till. What made them outlaw money was the violence used to acquire them.

The romanticisation of the outlaw — the highwayman as gentleman thief, the western bandit as folk hero — has always been partly a romanticisation of the coins they carried. The idea of stolen gold has a glamour that stolen digital transfers will never achieve. The coin is the thing.

Memento Mori — The Coins Killers Carried for Themselves

Not all the coins associated with history's dangerous men were payment for services rendered. Many were personal talismans — objects carried for protection, for luck, or as reminders of mortality. The memento mori tradition — the deliberate contemplation of death as a philosophical and spiritual practice — produced some of the most striking coin designs in history, and they were carried by soldiers, assassins, and outlaws as readily as by monks and philosophers.

The skull, the hourglass, the crossed bones, the scythe — the visual vocabulary of memento mori appeared on coins, rings, and personal objects across medieval and early modern Europe. For a soldier or a hired killer, the reminder of death was not abstract philosophy. It was professional reality. Carrying a coin that depicted a skull was a way of acknowledging what you were, what you risked, and what awaited you — a private conversation between the carrier and their own mortality.

Our Memento Mori Carpe Diem Stoic Coin and Memento Mori Skull Rose Coin sit directly in this tradition — coins designed not as payment but as personal objects, carrying the same dark philosophical weight that soldiers and outlaws throughout history have found in the skull and the reminder that time is short. The Stoic philosophers who developed the memento mori practice were not killers, but the men who carried these symbols into battle and beyond understood them in ways the philosophers could only theorise about.

The article on coins as propaganda through history explores the other side of this coin — the way rulers used coinage to project power and control narrative. The assassins and outlaws who operated in the shadows of those same rulers were spending the same coins, carrying the same metal, living in the same monetary world.

Collecting the Dark Side of Coin History

The coins associated with history's most dangerous men are, almost without exception, the ordinary coins of their time. The piece of eight that a pirate spent in a Tortuga tavern was identical to the one a Spanish merchant used to pay for silk in Manila. The gold dinar that funded an Assassin operation passed through the same hands as the one that paid a scholar's salary in Baghdad. Blood money looks like all other money. That is precisely what makes it so interesting.

The Historical World Coins Collection at One More Coin includes replicas of the coins that moved through these darker chapters of history — the pieces of eight of the pirate era, the colonial silver of the Atlantic trade routes, and the historical coins that connect the modern collector to the full complexity of the past. The Gothic Coins Collection carries the memento mori tradition forward — coins that acknowledge darkness, mortality, and the shadow side of human experience with the same directness that history's most dangerous men brought to their work.

Add one to your collection today with free worldwide shipping.

Frequently Asked Questions

What were the thirty pieces of silver?

The thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot for the betrayal of Jesus are the most famous blood money in history. The most likely candidate, based on historical context, is the Tyrian shekel — a large, high-purity silver coin minted in the Phoenician city of Tyre that was the standard currency accepted for temple tax payments in Jerusalem. The phrase "thirty pieces of silver" has entered every European language as a synonym for betrayal purchased with money.

What coins did pirates use?

The golden age of piracy (roughly 1650–1730) was funded almost entirely by the Spanish silver real, particularly the eight-real piece known as the "piece of eight." Minted from American silver at colonial mints in Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí, the piece of eight was the first truly global currency — accepted in every port from the Caribbean to the China Sea. It was the primary target of pirates operating in the Atlantic and Pacific during this period.

What is blood money?

Blood money is payment made for killing, betrayal, or violent services. The term originates with the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas in the Christian tradition, but the concept is universal — payment for assassination, mercenary service, or the proceeds of violent crime. Throughout history, blood money has always been paid in the ordinary coins of the time and place, indistinguishable from any other payment.

Who were the original Assassins?

The Hashshashin — the original Assassins — were a Nizari Ismaili sect that operated from mountain fortresses in Persia and Syria between the 11th and 13th centuries. They used targeted political assassination as a strategic tool, eliminating specific enemies with precision rather than engaging in open warfare. Their name entered every European language as the word for a political killer. They were funded by gold dinars — the standard currency of the medieval Islamic world.

What coins did mercenaries use in history?

Mercenaries were paid in whatever coin their employer could provide — Persian gold darics, Athenian silver tetradrachms, Venetian ducats, Florentine florins, or the coins of whatever state was hiring. The development of coined money in the ancient world made large-scale mercenary warfare possible for the first time, by providing a portable, standardised medium of payment that could be carried across borders and accepted by soldiers of any nationality.

What is a piece of eight?

A piece of eight is the common name for the Spanish silver eight-real coin (real de a ocho), the dominant global currency of the 17th and 18th centuries. Minted from American silver at colonial mints, it was accepted in every major port in the world and became the template for the US dollar when the new American republic needed a monetary standard. Spanish coins remained legal tender in the United States until 1857. The piece of eight is the coin most associated with the golden age of piracy.