20 Bani - Carol I

Romania's copper-nickel coinage of this period was produced almost entirely at the Hamburg mint (Hamburgische Münze), a dependency that reflected the young kingdom's lack of domestic minting infrastructure. Carol I, a Hohenzollern prince installed on the Romanian throne in 1866, had spent the intervening decades building state institutions from scratch — the national mint in Bucharest wouldn't achieve sustained independent output until well into the twentieth century.

The 1900 date falls near the tail end of this denomination's productive run before a design revision followed.