10 Livres

The Imperial Ottoman Bank — a Franco-British joint venture that held the Ottoman Empire's central banking concession — found itself in an impossible position after 1914. With its French and British shareholders now enemy nationals, the bank's operations were severely curtailed. The Ottoman government turned instead to German institutional support, and German printing infrastructure followed: this note was produced by the Reichsdruckerei in Berlin, a direct consequence of the wartime alliance cemented by the 1914 German-Ottoman pact.

By 1916 the empire was hemorrhaging currency stability. Notes like this one circulated alongside issues from the Ottoman Public Debt Administration and government-backed kaime, in a monetary environment of compounding distrust. The Reichsdruckerei imprint is visible in the engraving quality — sharper intaglio work than the domestic Ottoman presswork of the same period.