5 Euros 500 years of Livonian ferding

The ferding was a silver coin issued across Livonia — the medieval territory roughly corresponding to modern Latvia and Estonia — primarily by the Livonian Order and its associated bishops during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The 500-year anchor dates to around 1515, when ferding production was at its most active under the fractured ecclesiastical and military authorities competing for monetary control of the eastern Baltic. The coin survived as a regional denomination even as Livonian political authority collapsed under the combined pressures of the Reformation, Russian expansion under Ivan IV, and eventual partition among Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, and Denmark by 1583.