Kopeck - Alexey Mikhailovich о М

Alexey Mikhailovich came to the throne in 1645 at sixteen years old, and these wire money kopecks — hand-struck on irregularly cut flans in the medieval Russian tradition — were already an anachronism by the time he inherited them. The technology was unchanged from Ivan the Terrible's monetary reform of 1535, and it would remain so until Peter I forcibly scrapped the whole system in the early eighteenth century. Alexey's reign would eventually see the catastrophic copper riot of 1662, a direct consequence of debasing the kopeck by minting copper coins at silver face value.