1 Schilling - Henning Scharpenberg

Henning Scharpenberg served as Archbishop of Riga from 1424 to 1448, a tenure defined largely by the city's fractious relationship with the Livonian Order. The Order and the archbishopric spent much of this period in open jurisdictional conflict over control of Riga itself, and the city's right to issue its own coinage was itself a recurring point of contention. Scharpenberg's schillings circulated in a Baltic trading zone where Hanseatic commerce demanded reliable small silver, and the low fineness of this billon issue reflects the chronic silver shortages that plagued Livonian minting throughout the mid-fifteenth century.