1 Schilling Type 4

Riga's status as a free imperial city — confirmed by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1561 following the collapse of the Livonian Order — gave the city the right to mint its own coinage, which it exercised with considerable independence throughout the 1570s. These small billon schillings circulated alongside Polish, Swedish, and Russian issues in a Baltic trade zone where no single monetary authority had achieved dominance.

The .094 fineness reflects deliberate debasement practices common to small-denomination civic coinages of the period, where the cost of silver made honest billon uneconomical for everyday transactions.