Denga - Vasily I Dmitriyevich Cyrillic legend / Warrior right

Vasily I spent much of his reign navigating an impossible position between the Golden Horde and the expanding Lithuanian state under Vytautas, whose daughter Sophia he had married — a dynastic hedge that bought relative peace but constant political subordination. These dengas were struck during a particularly tense interval following the Battle of the Vorskla River, after which Vytautas's regional ambitions had been checked by Timur's successor forces, briefly easing Lithuanian pressure on Moscow's western frontier.

At 0.38g, these coins represent the degraded weight standard that had crept into Muscovite coinage by the early fifteenth century, down considerably from earlier issues in the series.