Denga - Vasily I Dmitriyevich Shahada / Shahada

Vasily I inherited Moscow's mint from Dmitry Donskoy and continued issuing coinage under the complex political shadow of the Golden Horde, to whose khans Moscow remained nominally tributary. The Shahada — the Islamic declaration of faith — appearing on these dengas reflects that dependency directly: Mongol-influenced legends were carried over from earlier Muscovite coinage as a form of diplomatic acknowledgment, not religious conversion. The practice was pragmatic, not ideological.

HP II#1418 places this squarely within a transitional phase when Muscovite moneyers were still borrowing Tatar graphic conventions while beginning to assert local dynastic identity in the same dies.