Half-denga - Vasily I Dmitriyevich Cyrillic legend / Ornament

Vasily I spent much of his reign navigating the demands of the Golden Horde while simultaneously consolidating Muscovite territory — a balancing act that shaped even minor monetary decisions. These fractional silver pieces circulated in a system where the denga itself was already a small denomination, making the half-denga effectively the smallest practical unit of exchange in early 15th-century Moscow.

The HP II#1535 reference places this within Hrîstodulov and Petrov's typology of early Muscovite coinage, a series notorious for attribution difficulties given the volume of imitative and sub-princely issues produced concurrently across rival appanages.