5 Livres Turques

The Banque Impériale Ottomane was a Franco-British joint venture chartered in 1863, not a state bank — it held the exclusive right to issue banknotes on behalf of the Ottoman government, an arrangement that made it simultaneously a commercial bank and a de facto central bank for an empire increasingly dependent on foreign capital. This 1909 issue falls squarely in the immediate aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution, when the Committee of Union and Progress forced the restoration of the 1876 constitution and deposed Abdülhamid II the following year.

Bradbury, Wilkinson's engraved work for the Ottoman series is among the more technically accomplished currency printing of the period. The watermarked cotton substrate was a deliberate countermeasure — Ottoman banknotes had been forged with enough frequency in the late nineteenth century to become a recurring administrative problem.