S8 Ep287: THE STUPIDITY OF SUCCESSORS: MANUEL AND ANDRONICUS Colleague Professor Ed Watts, Author of The Romans. Manuel Komnenos favored grand gestures over systemic stability, weakening the Roman state. His successor, Andronicus, was a nihilistic sadist whose tyra

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 8 January 2026

⏱️ 7 minutes

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THE STUPIDITY OF SUCCESSORS: MANUEL AND ANDRONICUS Colleague Professor Ed Watts, Author of The Romans. Manuel Komnenos favored grand gestures over systemic stability, weakening the Roman state. His successor, Andronicus, was a nihilistic sadist whose tyranny and family infighting destabilized the empire. Watts details how the refusal to punish rebellious family members created a culture of impunity that eventually led to a violent overthrow. NUMBER 10
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0:00.0	I'm John Batchel with Ed Watts, Professor Ed Watts, whose book The Romans tells the story of melodrama, again and again and again, especially if you doubt the family is not a strong instrument of both creation and destruction.
0:15.5	I have 2,000 years of Rome to demonstrate.
0:18.5	The common annoy, we never get away from them now.
0:20.6	They're always
0:21.0	with us. And after the choices that were available to Alexius I first, we come to what
0:28.1	appears to be a good turn in the road. Manuel, not only does he have a name that suggests
0:34.0	South America, but he turns out to be a good king or a good emperor to a limit.
0:40.7	What is his ambition?
0:42.5	So the chapter that you just referred to, the stupidity of the successors,
0:45.9	these are the words used by Alexios's daughter, Anna Komnenos,
0:50.3	to describe the actions of the people who followed him.
0:57.0	And Manuel is the second follower,
1:03.5	the second successor after Alexios. And what we see with Manuel is he's incredibly charismatic,
1:13.1	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
1:20.7	the Syrian city of Antioch. And he goes, he defeats them, he leads the king of Antioch in a
1:27.1	procession. He participates in jousting
1:29.6	because this is what Manuel was very interested in, he impresses the Antiochines with how good a
1:34.4	jostry is, and then he leaves. And so what Manuel does is he, you know, because he is so capable,
1:40.2	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.
1:51.9	And so historically what had made Rome successful were these systems and the capacity that Rome had to create structures that made sustainable all of the gains that Rome had each generation.
2:05.9	And what Manuel does is he makes many, many gains, but he's not very interested in putting together systems to make those things sustainable.
2:13.3	And so it looks very impressive, but it is very sort of superficial.
	...

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