Denga - Ivan IV

The denga was already an archaic denomination by the time Ivan IV assumed nominal power as an infant in 1533, but the coinage reform of 1535 — engineered by his mother Elena Glinskaya as regent — fundamentally restructured Russian silver currency for the next century. That reform abolished the regional minting systems that had allowed Novgorod, Tver, and Pskov to produce coins of varying fineness, imposing a single imperial weight standard across Muscovy. The Moscow denga, as the half-unit of the new system, bore the weight relationship to the novgorodka that defined Russian monetary reckoning well into the Romanov period.