Kopeck - Alexey Mikhailovich

Alexey Mikhailovich inherited the throne at sixteen following his father Mikhail's death in 1645, and these wire money kopecks — struck by the hammered fish-scale method unchanged since Ivan the Terrible's monetary reform of 1535 — were among his first issued coinage. The technique involved cutting irregular slivers from a drawn silver wire and striking them between hand-cut dies, producing the characteristic lozenge shapes that circulated throughout Muscovy. Russia would not abandon this medieval minting method until Peter I's coinage reform of 1698.