5 Gulden

The k.k. Staats-Central-Cassa was not a bank in any conventional sense — it was the Austrian imperial treasury's direct financing arm, issuing these notes to cover the catastrophic military expenditure of 1848–49. The revolutionary upheavals across the Habsburg domains, from Vienna to Budapest to Milan, had shredded normal state finances, and these Gulden notes were an emergency fiscal instrument, not a product of measured monetary policy.

Paper quality on surviving examples tends to be fragile; the wartime printing conditions in Vienna were not ideal, and the notes circulated hard through a population that had little alternative.