The extreme difficulties of the dearth of coin and credit in the early 1460s disappeared very suddenly with the opening-up of new sources of silver.

A whole series of new discoveries of silver ore were made in the Alps and in the Erzgebirge, particularly at Schwaz in the Tirol and at Schneeberg in Saxony. At the same time a series of technical innovations, for example in the refining of silver, and in the development of pumps for draining the mines, made it profitable to reopen old mines. These revived mines included those at Kutná Hora in Bohemia, at Freiberg in Saxony and at Goslar in the Harz, each of which had already possessed the richest silver-mines in Europe in turn. The second period of exploitation of these revived mines produced relatively small amounts, however, compared with their first period of exploitation, or compared with the most important of the new mines being opened up in the second half of the fifteenth century.

The ore at Schwaz and at Schneeberg had been discovered before 1460, but it was not until well after 1460 that the mines at either place really began to produce silver in important quantities. The mines at Schneeberg in Saxony were developed the faster of the two. By the early 1470s over 30,000 marks of silver a year were being produced there, and a maximum annual production of nearly 45,000 marks was reached there between 1476 and 1485.