1 Gulden

The Wiener Stadt Banco was not a central bank in any modern sense but a municipal credit institution dating to 1706, originally established to manage Viennese civic debt. By 1800 it had become the principal issuer of low-denomination paper currency for the Habsburg lands — a role it held uneasily, as public trust in its notes had already been shaken by decades of war financing and expanding issue volumes.

The embossed seal was the primary anti-counterfeiting measure, applied by hand press after printing. Within a decade of this note's issue, the catastrophic Bankozettel inflation of the Napoleonic years would reduce the real value of such gulden notes to a fraction of face — the 1811 state bankruptcy formally devalued all outstanding banco paper by 80 percent.