Cupreous - Mikhail III Shishman

Mikhail III Shishman ruled during one of the more turbulent stretches of late Bulgarian imperial history, fighting simultaneously to hold off Serbian expansion under Stefan Dečanski and to manage fractious internal loyalties following the chaos of the Terter and Smilets dynasties. His reign ended at the Battle of Velbazhd in 1330, where Bulgarian forces were routed and Mikhail himself was mortally wounded — a defeat that effectively ended Bulgarian military primacy in the western Balkans for a generation.

Copper issues of the Second Empire are notoriously difficult to attribute with precision; die-cutting quality varied sharply across minting sites, and the absence of consistent mint organization under the Shishman rulers compounds the problem.