Denga - Vasily I Dmitriyevich Bird left / Arabic legend imitation

Vasily I inherited a Moscow already experimenting with coinage his father Dmitry Donskoy had introduced in the 1380s, partly in imitation of Tatar Khan issues — a political necessity given Moscow's continued tribute obligations to the Golden Horde. The Arabic inscriptions on these dengas were not functional text but imitative gibberish, copied by die-cutters who had no knowledge of the script. This was deliberate: it signaled nominal Tatar legitimacy while asserting a distinctly Muscovite iconographic program on the opposing side.

HP II#1565 is among the more precisely attributed varieties in the Hanatsevich-Petrunin corpus for this reign, placing it within a narrow window of Vasily's later output before his death in 1425.