Wire Money - Early Russian Hammered Silver Coins, circa 15th-18th Centuries

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01-Denga, Ivan III	02-Denga, Ivan III	03-Denga, Vasiliy III	04-Denga, Vasiliy III
05-Polushka	06-Denga, Ivan IV	07-Sword Kopek, Ivan IV	08-Sword Kopek, Ivan IV

This photo gallery shows the early Russian silver coins called "Wire Money" ("Fish Scales" - "Чешуйки" in Russian) that were hammered at the Novgorod, Pskov, Tver and Moscow mints during the reigns of a few Russian tsars (not all!). The dates of the coins range from 1479 to 1701. The images depict coins from the hoards that I recovered with a metal detector in the eastern Baltic Sea region in Europe (see my full stories: Discovery of a Huge Coin Hoard and Coin Cache Discovery).

Each image is accompanied with the complete description of the coin's design and the exact cyrillic script of the coin's legend that corresponds to the coin shown according to the catalogue. The depicted wire coins might lack certain details of their design due to the flaws in the crude method of their production, which is described below.

The "Wire Money" were produced from the silver wire which was made from the silver Thalers brought to Russia from the European kingdoms. The silver wire was cut into measured lengths which were flattened and annealed to gain their plasticity. The resulting blanks were struck between two dies. The dies were not conjugated: the lower die was fixed in a special support, the upper die was held in the hand of the striker, who directed it on the blank laying on the lower die (see Brief Numismatic History of Russian Wire Money).

Because of the imperfect techniques of coining the wire money by hand, the coins might bear many defects on the obverse and reverse designs: the horse might be without one or two legs, the spear or the horseman’s cloak might be partially missing, one or more letters in the inscription might be absent, a few letters can be reversed and so on. Hammering the coins with the worn-out die produced unclear lines in images - some details were lost. Cracks and bumps in the field of the rusted die made the images grainy and dull. Uneven distribution of the strength during the die’s strike made the letters of script appear clear-cut on one edge of the coin and only weak on another. All things mentioned can make identification of wire coins very complicated or sometimes impossible.