Denga - Vasily I Dmitriyevich

Vasily I inherited the Moscow throne in 1389 following his father Dmitry Donskoy's death, and his early coinage reflects the political ambiguity of the period — Moscow had won at Kulikovo in 1380 but remained a Tatar tributary, and the denga coinage of his reign shows this tension in its imitative Mongol-derived designs. The Russian denga as a denomination took its name directly from the Tatar "dänga," and Vasily's issues represent some of the earliest attempts by Moscow's moneyers to assert a distinct local identity within that borrowed framework.