5 Gulden

The Wiener Stadt Banco was not a commercial bank in any modern sense — it was a municipal credit institution founded in 1706, and by the early nineteenth century it had become the primary vehicle through which the Habsburg state issued paper money, nominally under the city of Vienna's authority rather than the imperial government directly. This legal fiction was partly deliberate, insulating the emperor from direct association with an increasingly inflated paper supply.

By 1806, Austria was in serious fiscal distress following the costs of the Napoleonic campaigns. The Banco-Zettel notes of this period depreciated sharply; the 1811 Bankozettel devaluation reduced their face value to one-fifth, meaning notes issued just a few years prior — including this series — were formally worth a fraction of their printed denomination within five years of issue.