Æ Trachy Andronicus III Palaeologus

Andronicus III came to power after a prolonged civil war against his own grandfather, Andronicus II, a conflict that drained Byzantine treasury reserves and disrupted mint operations across the empire. The trachy coinage of his reign reflects that fiscal exhaustion — copper issues were struck in quantity as silver effectively disappeared from everyday transactions, and the monetary system increasingly relied on these debased small denominations to function at all.

Constantinople's mint output during this reign is notoriously inconsistent, with significant die-to-die variation in flan preparation and strike pressure recorded across the DOC V series.