Estonia
Medieval Reval, a Hanseatic town in the Livonian Confederation, reckoned in the Riga mark, a money of account of thirty-six Livonian schillings, itself quartered into ferdings. No mark piece circulated; payment was made in the small silver schillings and artigs struck at Riga, Reval, Dorpat and Wenden, whose silver content fell steadily across the fifteenth century, with a fresh debasement introducing lower-grade schillings around 1480. Gold was foreign: Rhenish gulden and Hungarian ducats arrived through the Baltic trade, and the Livonian Order struck only a small number of gulden of its own. What makes the territory exceptional for a record of creative expenditure is not its coinage but its paperwork. Tallinn’s city archive is among the best preserved medieval municipal archives in Europe, and beside it survive the account books of the Great Guild, the Brotherhood of the Blackheads and the parish churches, together with the printed Liv-, Est- und Kurländisches Urkundenbuch. Sums paid to named Lübeck painters and carvers for altarpieces can therefore be read off the record directly, and the objects themselves are often still in place.
Gold weight and purity converter →Making a film here? The Canada–Estonia corridor covers the treaty, the incentives, and where to start.