5 Gulden

The Privilegirte Oesterreichische National-Bank was under severe strain by the mid-1840s — the bank's silver cover ratio had been deteriorating for years, and the revolution of 1848 would soon trigger a full-blown currency crisis and suspension of specie payments. This 1847 note was issued right on that fault line, during a period when public confidence in paper florin denominations was fragile and convertibility still nominally guaranteed.

The watermark was the primary security measure of the period, intaglio printing technology for Austrian state paper being less sophisticated than contemporary British or French practice. Counterfeiting of the pre-revolutionary Austrian issues was a known and documented problem.