5 Bani - Carol I

Romania's copper-nickel coinage of this period was produced almost entirely at the Brussels mint, a consequence of the young kingdom lacking domestic minting capacity adequate for volume production. The 1900 issue came during a relatively stable stretch of Carol I's long reign, sandwiched between the country's post-independence debt pressures of the 1880s and the Balkan crises that would follow within a decade.

KM#28 replaced an earlier copper type of identical denomination — the shift to copper-nickel alloy mirrored a broader European trend away from pure copper for small-denomination coins in the 1880s and 1890s.