Aspron Trachy - Theodore I Laskaris Nicaea

Theodore I Laskaris struck these bronze aspra trachea at Nicaea after the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204 drove the Byzantine court into exile in Anatolia. The Empire of Nicaea was not a successor state in the abstract — it was a government-in-waiting, maintaining Byzantine administrative and monetary structures with deliberate precision as a political claim to eventual restoration. Coinage was part of that argument.

The scyphate fabric, inherited directly from Constantinopolitan practice, was retained specifically to assert continuity with the legitimate imperial tradition.