Half-denga - Vasily I Dmitriyevich Letter Д / Bird left

Vasily I ruled Moscow during the decades when Tatar overlordship was crumbling but not yet broken — a period when Russian princes minted their own silver partly to assert fiscal independence and partly because disrupted tribute flows made local coinage practically necessary. The half-denga was the smallest denomination in circulation, and these tiny flans were notoriously difficult to strike evenly, which accounts for the characteristically off-center or weakly defined surfaces seen across the type.

The HP II#1621 attribution places this within Huletsky and Petrov's classification of Moscow wire-money predecessors — hand-cut flans hammered with minimal die alignment. No two are quite alike.