Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium episode 351, the 10 worst Byzantine emperors.

I found this task far trickier than choosing good emperors.

I think 99% of us would pick the same top 20 good emperors,

and then it just comes down to your personal preferences.

But bad emperors, that's not so easy.

For example, if someone presides over collapse across a decade, fails to stop it, but it's otherwise a nice guy,

how do you compare him to someone who tortures their own tenure within 18 months and is overthrown?

Who was the poorer emperor?

By definition, a good emperor has to both survive and help the state to thrive.

But you can be a bad Vassilifs in multiple ways.

Then you get into questions about whether you include things people did in order to get to the throne

or only their actions once they were crowned and how

much you take into account how things played out after their time in power? Can you blame them for

what went wrong under their successes and so on? As with my top 10 greatest emperors, I'll leave

a full discussion of criteria to the end of the list, and we'll talk

about those who didn't make it.

Unlike with the best emperors, though, I'm not going to do a countdown.

I think it's easier to follow my logic if we go from one to ten.

So the number one, worst emperor is Andronicus the first Cominus, 1183 to 1185.

As you know, this is not a podcast for silly nicknames and injokes, and yet I have been very

comfortable calling this man filthy old Andronicus since his reign began.

And that's because he stood out to me as clearly the worst Roman emperor of our podcast era.

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