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MONETARY HISTORY OF KIEV IN THE PRE-MONGOL PERIOD 401were a negligible factor in trade anywhere in Rus': the copper coins hadvery little value, whereas the gold coins were both too few and too valuableto be of use in commerce. The few miliaresia to reach Rus' made no realdifference.As already mentioned, large numbers of silver ingots have been foundthroughout the Rus' lands, particularly in Kiev; many were also cast there.The ingots found in and around Kiev alone are the equivalent of tens ofthousands of dirhams or deniers. Many, if not most, of these Kiev-typeingots were deposited between the 1170s and 1240, giving us a probabledate when most were cast. At that time, neither dirhams nor deniers werebeing imported into Rus'. Where, then, did the silver for these monetaryingots come from? The extreme paucity of deniers in Kiev and the slightlylarger numbers found in greater Kiev may well mean that most deniers toreach Kiev were melted down to make ingots or jewelry. Certainly, anyonelooking for silver to refashion into ingots during the century before theMongol conquest would have used deniers for raw material. Dirhams,miliaresia, and solidi were probably similarly endangered, but deniers weremore vulnerable because they were far more recent imports than dirhamsand because there were far more of them than of miliaresia and solidi.While few deniers have surfaced in Kiev, a variety of written sourceshave documented Kiev's lively overland trade with southern Germany inthe pre-Mongol era. Why did this trade not bring to Kiev more Czech,Hungarian, and especially German deniers? The best explanation seems tobe that this overland trade functioned on the basis of a balanced barter ofgoods and thus did not require coinage. 77 Coinage is not requisite for trade,as the many barter arrangements in Eastern Europe in our own time demonstrate.Rus' CoinsDuring the late tenth and early eleventh centuries (989-1019), several Rus'princes (Volodimer, Sviatopolk, and Iaroslav) struck their own coins, usuallyreferred to as either sribnyky (silver coins) or zolotnyky (gold coins).Recently Sotnikova and Spasskii studied all the 341 examples of these coinsknown today. Of these 341 coins, eleven were gold and 330 were silver.All the zolotnyky as well as the sribnyky of Volodimer and Sviatopolk werestruck in Kiev. 78 The sribnyky of Volodimer (245) and Sviatopolk (68)7778Potin, Drevniaia Rus', pp. 48-52.Sotnikova and Spasskii, Russian Coins, p. 7.