This is John Batchelor. Further conversation with Professor Ed Watts. His new book is the Romans,

a 2000-year history. And as the Roman Empire grew again from the bad patch it went through in the

7th century, it gained a family known collectively as a common annoy,, comni no nurses.

And they were extremely fecund, as the professor teaches.

Lots of babies, lots of people to inherit the throne, only one at a time.

One of the first was the very successful Manuel in the 12th century, but, as the professor explains here, he made some bad choices, and one of them was he was superficial.

A great-looking emperor, but 12th century, A.D. Constantinople, right before the end of the Roman institutions that we think of as the Roman Empire.

Much more of this tonight, the fourth hour of my conversation with the professor on the Romans.

So the chapter that you just referred to, the stupidity of the successors, these are the words

used by Alexius's daughter, Anna Komnenos, to describe the actions of the people who followed him.

And Manuel is the second follower, the second successor after Alexios. And what we see with

Manuel is he's incredibly charismatic,

but he also really believes in grand gestures much more than sort of deep strategic thinking.

So one of the things that Manuel does is he goes and he reexerts Roman authority over a

kingdom, a state centered around the

Syrian city of Antioch. And he goes, he defeats them, he leads the king of Antioch in a procession.

He participates in jousting because this is what Manuel was very interested in. He impresses

the Antiochines with how good a jostry is, and then he leaves.

And so what Manuel does is he, you know, because he is so capable, he builds a state that

superficially looks very powerful. But it's actually quite weak because he hasn't done the strategic

thinking to integrate all of the things that he has done in a systematic way.

And so historically what had made Rome successful were these systems and the capacity that Rome had to create structures

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