Vasily I spent much of his reign navigating an impossible position between the Tatar Golden Horde, to whom Moscow still paid tribute, and the expanding pressure of Lithuania under Vytautas — his own father-in-law. The falconer type on Moscow dengas of this period reflects borrowing from Tatar artistic conventions, a deliberate political gesture toward the Horde at a time when Vasily needed their backing to survive Lithuanian encroachment.
HP II#1568A places this among the more precisely attributed varieties in the Hroschen-type Russian series, though die alignment and legend spacing vary considerably across the emission, making clean attributions genuinely difficult on worn examples.
Vasily I spent much of his reign navigating an impossible position between the Tatar Golden Horde, to whom Moscow still paid tribute, and the expanding pressure of Lithuania under Vytautas — his own father-in-law. The falconer type on Moscow dengas of this period reflects borrowing from Tatar artistic conventions, a deliberate political gesture toward the Horde at a time when Vasily needed their backing to survive Lithuanian encroachment.
HP II#1568A places this among the more precisely attributed varieties in the Hroschen-type Russian series, though die alignment and legend spacing vary considerably across the emission, making clean attributions genuinely difficult on worn examples.