Denga - Vasily I Dmitriyevich

Vasily I inherited Moscow's mint from his father Dmitry Donskoy, who had introduced coinage to the principality only shortly before — Moscow's minting tradition was barely a generation old when these dengas were struck. The designs of this period are notoriously eclectic, drawing on Tatar prototypes and borrowing Arabic-script imitations that the Moscow princes used partly to signal continued, if uneasy, subordination to the Golden Horde. Vasily's reign coincided with the Horde's internal collapse following Timur's defeat of Tokhtamysh at the Terek River in 1395, which dramatically shifted the political calculus Moscow operated under.

Die-cutting was entirely artisanal, producing substantial variation between individual pieces.