Aspron Trachy - Andronicus I Gidon

Andronicus I Gidon ruled Trebizond during a period of acute military pressure, squeezed between the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum to the south and a resurgent Nicaean Empire contesting Byzantine legitimacy from the west. The aspron trachy — a concave or scyphate flan — was a denomination inherited directly from Constantinople, and Trebizond's continued use of it was a deliberate assertion of imperial continuity from a dynasty that had fled the Latin sack of 1204.

Trebizond's silver issues from this reign are notably rare in the DOC corpus; only a handful of specimens informed the DOC IV-2 classification. The scyphate flan on provincial silver strikes of this period frequently shows uneven curvature from hand-finished dies.