5 Bani - Carol I Pattern Strike

Pattern strikes for Romanian minor coinage in the early 1900s were produced almost exclusively at the Brussels mint, which had held a near-monopoly on Romanian coin production since the Kingdom's foundational issues of the 1860s. The 1905 brass trial for the 5 Bani was part of a series of compositional experiments as Romania weighed cheaper alloys against the copper-nickel then in circulation. Carol I, by this point four decades into his reign, took an unusually direct personal interest in coinage approvals — several pattern series from his later reign show multiple rejected trials before a final type was authorized.