500 Gulden

The Wiener Stadt Banco was not a bank in any modern commercial sense — it was a municipal credit institution founded in 1706 to manage Vienna's civic debt, and by 1800 it had become the primary mechanism through which the Habsburg state financed its chronic wartime deficits. The Napoleonic Wars were already straining Austrian finances severely, and the flood of Banco notes issued in this period contributed directly to the collapse of 1811, when Austria declared a state bankruptcy and reduced the face value of outstanding paper by 80 percent.

A surviving 500 Gulden note from 1800 represents one of the higher denominations in active use just before that catastrophe.