500 Gulden

The k.k. Staats-Central-Cassa was the Austrian imperial treasury's instrument for direct note issuance, operating in parallel with — and often in tension with — the Privilegirte Oesterreichische National-Bank. The 1849 date is significant: Austria was still absorbing the financial shock of the 1848 revolutions, and emergency state finance drove a sharp expansion of paper money that the National Bank had neither the capacity nor the mandate to cover alone.

At 500 Gulden this was a high-denomination instrument, circulating almost exclusively in commercial and government transactions. Survival rate is low; large-denomination notes of this period were routinely withdrawn and destroyed once conditions stabilized in the early 1850s.