100 Livres

The Imperial Ottoman Bank's wartime note issues were printed in Germany from 1915 onward as a direct consequence of the Allied naval blockade cutting off the Bank's normal access to its French printing contractor, Imprimerie Nationale. The Reichsdruckerei relationship was a wartime necessity, not a commercial preference — the Bank had been a Franco-British institution by charter since 1863, and sourcing its currency production from a German imperial press was an arrangement that would have been unthinkable twelve months earlier.

The 1917 series, of which this 100 Livres is part, circulated through the final turbulent years of the Ottoman Empire's existence as a functioning state. Rampant inflation made high-denomination notes like this one increasingly common and increasingly worthless in short succession.