 One example is the decision of Offa, the eighth-century King of Mercia (one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms existing at that time), to have coins minted with an Islamic inscription on them—copies of coins issued by the near-contemporary Muslim ruler Al-Mansur.It is thought that they were minted to facilitate trade with the expanding Islamic empire in Spain.Muslim scholarship was well known among the learned in England by 1386, when Chaucer was writing.