Vasily I inherited a Moscow treasury still recovering from the devastation of Tokhtamysh's 1382 sack of the city, and his copper puli occupied the lowest rung of a bimetallic system where silver denga were too valuable for small transactions. The Arabic legends on these pieces are not functional text — they are decorative imitations, a carry-over from Mongol monetary conventions that Moscow's moneyers reproduced without literacy in the script, resulting in meaningless pseudo-kufic that varies substantially die to die.
Hrostretsky-Petrunin II#1410 places this type within a loose decade-long bracket, reflecting the near impossibility of precise dating for copper issues of this principality.
Vasily I inherited a Moscow treasury still recovering from the devastation of Tokhtamysh's 1382 sack of the city, and his copper puli occupied the lowest rung of a bimetallic system where silver denga were too valuable for small transactions. The Arabic legends on these pieces are not functional text — they are decorative imitations, a carry-over from Mongol monetary conventions that Moscow's moneyers reproduced without literacy in the script, resulting in meaningless pseudo-kufic that varies substantially die to die.
Hrostretsky-Petrunin II#1410 places this type within a loose decade-long bracket, reflecting the near impossibility of precise dating for copper issues of this principality.