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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Numismatic advertisements of competing claims to the title of grand prince served as a useful propaganda medium during the Muscovite succession struggles of the 1400s but also yielded a persistent slippage between coins' function of proclaiming political legitimacy and conferring that legitimacy. This article outlines the mutually symbolizing relation between coinage and succession in the cultural imagination of the Daniilovich dynasty and beyond. It focuses on verbal tropes, succession practices, and economic functions by turns in order to elucidate the rhetorical matrix that identified the legitimacy of the tsar and of money and to sketch out its evolving applications. First, I read passages from Ivan IV's first letter to Prince Kurbskii to show how the tsar conceived of usurpation as a falsified succession suggestive of falsified coin. Then, I treat early Muscovite coins that articulated family relationships, especially conflicts between primogenitary and collateral principles of inheritance. Finally, I relate the sovereign to the material artifact of money, particularly coins representing him as a mintmaster or as an executioner poised to punish counterfeiters, in order to contextualize efforts by enemies of the state to command numismatic symbols. In all of these contexts, the perception of legitimate succession is intertwined with a currency of signs and the circulation of specie.
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10. Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, 39 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1872-1927; hereafter RIB), 13:393. Some pretenders surrounded themselves with entire substitute families; for example, an eighteenth-century man not only represented himself as Peter III but called his mother the Empress Elizabeth. This man was also considered by his followers to be Jesus Christ and his mother the Virgin Mary, a phenomenon bound up with the myth of the tsar as Christ—a religious dimension to royal imposture that this footnote cannot deal with in depth. See Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 225-26Google Scholar; and Uspenskii, “Tsar and Pretender,” 260-62, for analysis of this point. Pretenders claiming to be the real Aleksei Petrovich, son of Peter I, appeared even during the prince's lifetime, which, according to Uspenskii, “testifies to the fact that viewing Peter as a ‘substituted’ Tsar could be transferred to his son: in as much as Peter is seen as a false Tsar, his son may be seen as the false heir.” Uspenskii, “Tsar and Pretender,” 277.
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17. The point is rephrased in similar terms in Ivan IV's second letter of 1577. Perepiska, 166.
18. Correspondence, 179; Perepiska, 52.
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23. I have slightly literalized Fennell's translation.
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25. Dukhovnye i dogovornye gramoty velikikh i udel'nykh kniazei XIV-XVI vv., ed. L. V. Cherepnin and S. V. Bakhrushin (Moscow, 1950; hereafter DDG), 361. Efforts to limit coinage in appanage principalities are discernable as far back as the reign of Vasilii I. See Noonan, “Forging a National Identity,” 508.
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34. For an extended treatment of this topic, see Craig Kennedy, “Fathers, Sons, and Brothers: Ties of Metaphorical Kinship between the Muscovite Grand Princes and the Tatar Elite,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, no. 19 (January 1995): 292-301.
35. PSRL, 11:183.
36. As the scribe might have known, Vitovt's vassal princes, including the Russian rulers of Chernigov and Smolensk, did mint coins with Vitovt's heraldic emblem on the reverse.
37. See Alef, Gustave, “The Political Significance of the Inscriptions on Muscovite Coinage,” Speculum 34, no. 1 (January 1959): 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Prince Vitovt was Vasilii II's grandfather and the head of his regency council; until his death, in 1431, Vitovt prevented Iurii Dmitrievich from deposing the underage prince. See Martin, Medieval Russia, 265-66.
38. DDG, 60; PSRL, 8:9
40. Alef, “Political Significance of the Inscriptions on Muscovite Coinage,” 5.
41. See, e.g., Majeska, , “The Moscow Coronation of 1498“; and Martin, Medieval Russia, 272-74Google Scholar, for descriptions of anticipatory succession ceremonies in relation to evolving succession principles. Anticipatory succession has been practiced in other situations where succession principles were unclear, notably Capetian France and seventh-century Byzantium. See Andrew Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 37-42; and David Michael Olster, The Politics of Usurpation in the Seventh Century: Rhetoric and Revolution in Byzantium (Amsterdam, 1993), 180-81.
42. Oreshnikov, Russkie monety, coins nos. 707-12.
43. Ibid., coins nos. 717-18.
44. Ibid., coins nos. 719-21. The side attributed to Dmitrii Iur'evich features a rider piercing the head of a dragon with a spear with a circular inscription; the side attributed to Vasilii II has only four lines of text spelling out the grand prince's name and rank.
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48. Late in his reign, Vasilii II himself replaced the numismatic formula “Sovereign of All Rus'” with the pluralized “Sovereigns of All Rus'” to reflect his eldest son Ivan's co-option, attested to by a 1448 treaty in which Vasilii explicitly refers to Ivan as grand prince. Oreshnikov, Russkie monety, coins nos. 615, 617, 632, 634; DDG, 155. Like his father's 1425 coins ambiguously attributed to “Vasilii” and issued by the members of the regency council, these pieces aimed to forestall any doubt as to the legitimate heir. See Alef, “Political Significance of the Inscriptions on Muscovite Coinage,” 11.
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58. Ibid., 100.
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68. The distribution of small crosses on the bodies of pretenders in 1765,1772, and 1774—on the head, arms, and foot—seems to echo the distribution of crosses on the gerb depicted on contemporary rubles: a large cross on the main crown, two smaller crosses below and to the sides of it (on each of the two eagle heads), and a prominent cross on the orb held in the eagle's left foot. In periods when a cross occupied the entire obverse or reverse of the ruble, crosses appear correspondingly on the chest or back of the pretender.
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