The appearance of a minted metal coin is an important milestone in the history of any state. This is evidence that this society has reached a high degree of economic and social development.
The first Russian coins
At the end of the 10th century. in Kievan Rus, the minting of its own coins from gold and silver began. The first Russian coins were called "monetary" and "silver coins". The coins depicted the Grand Duke of Kiev and a kind of state emblem in the shape of a trident, the so-called sign of the Rurikovich. The inscription on the coins of Prince Vladimir (980 - 1015) read: "Vladimir is on the table, and this is his silver", which means: "Vladimir is on the throne, and this is his money." Thus, for a long time in Russia the word "silver" - "silver" was equivalent to the concept of money.
The first coins were primitive both in technique and design. The art of minting coins improved every century, engraving also improved, the image became more realistic, and due to the increase in the coin field, the compositional possibilities of carvers expanded. And it is no coincidence that many of the memorial coins are classified as works of art in small forms.
The first Moscow coins
In Moscow, minted money first appeared during the reign of Dmitry Donskoy in the second half of the 14th century. On the coins there was an embossed inscription "The seal of the great prince Dmitry". These coins look like small, thin, irregular silver scales. Also, images of a rooster or a warrior with an ax and a saber in different hands were sometimes minted on coins, and in the 14th century they began to mint a warrior with a spear on horseback.
During the reign of Ivan the Third, the inscription “Ivan the Great Prince and the Sovereign of All Russia” appeared on the coins. And although Ivan the Third was sure that there should be Russian gold in the land, he had to mint gold coins (the so-called "Ugric chervonets") from foreign, imported gold.
Ivan the Terrible established the Order of Stone Affairs, which supervised the search for gold and silver ores. By the end of the 15th century, the Russian people began to develop the Perm land and the slopes of the Ural Mountains, but all searches for gold here were unsuccessful. They were especially active in the area of the Pechora River, where copper and silver ores were found, but not gold.
Russian names of coins
The written monuments have preserved the ancient Russian names of the metal coin, "kuna" and "nogat", and the names of smaller payment units equal to half of the kuna "cut" and "veveritsa", the relation of which to the kuna is determined in different ways. Kuni was both a "dirham", and the "denarius" that replaced him, and a "Russian silver coin". The oldest common Slavic name of the coin is consonant with the name "coin", which appeared in the language of the tribes of Northern Europe on the basis of the circulation of the Roman denarius.
Probably, the Western Slavs first met him. Forcing out the term "silver", the word "kuns" for a long time was fixed in the Slavic languages in the general meaning of "money".
