1 Schilling - Johannes VI Bey Pointy shields with regular squiggles, sword left, key right and down

The Bishopric of Dorpat — controlling the eastern Baltic city now known as Tartu, Estonia — was already in existential crisis during these years. The Livonian Confederation was fracturing under pressure from both the Reformation and mounting Muscovite aggression, and Bishop Johannes VI Bey was issuing coinage against a political backdrop in which the entire ecclesiastical order in Livonia had perhaps two decades left to exist. The Livonian War that began in 1558 would extinguish Dorpat as an independent bishopric entirely.

The billon composition — barely a tenth silver by modern standards — reflects the monetary degradation common to small Livonian ecclesiastical mints in their final decades.