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.