I think the ERE was prone to intrigue and regicide, to it's detriment, but that doesn't mean it was always wrong. Even Totila usurped a weak, pro-ERE King and killed him. It would have been a blessing to the people of the Balkans if someone had killed Vladislas II of Hungary. The problem is that good emperors were as likely to face assassination or civil war as bad ones.
What good emperors do you have in mind besides Romanus IV?
Show me how the period between Constantine I and Constantine XI was consistently marred by regicide and intrigue. Please.
Finding examples of how for instance Romanus was overthrown does not illustrate the norm of the state just because it had happened.
'Handled' is an interesting term for surrendering huge amounts of territory.
I'll put it this way. If the Franks had been hit by the Arabs the way the ERE was hit by the Arabs, in the situation it was hit by the Arabs, there wouldn't be a kingdom of the Franks.
The empire was able to absorb losing Egypt and the Levant and recover and begin to retake those lands.
So yes, "handled". It managed to deal with defeat and come back.
I would sooner have lived in the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. It had the Greek/Roman/Arab advancement without the religious purges.
Yeah, because those religious purges were so frequent and so devastating.
Also, the Norman kingdom of Sicily was considerably shorter lived, so comparing a state of not even a century (If we go back to the first Norman duchies, I'll give it just under a century and a half) to something that lasted over a thousand years is misleading.
To reinstitute the Thema.
On what lands?
Those they'd have to seize from the aristocracy, with all the fact no aristocracy in any part of Eurasia reacted to royal power doing that?
Bouncing back with help of the Western barbarians. Large parts of Anatolia were only won back with the help of the 3rd Crusade.
1st? Maybe. Not without considerable ability displayed by Alexius in taking advantage of the situation, though - the crusaders didn't lead to much directly if at all, and this is ignoring their theft of Antioch. 3rd? What timeline is this?
Anatolia was won back to the extent it was won back by Roman sweat and Roman generalship, not the transitory passage of crusaders who held on to the areas they seized whether they were rightfully Imperial lands or not.
Okay, so maybe I can't ignore them stealing Antioch, because that bit of dishonesty went directly against the oaths they swore. Frankish fidelty indeed.
Also, of course, this ignores earlier periods, but that's okay, since you already named Heraclius as one of the (short to you apparently) list of good emperors.
I take nothing away from the Emperors who arrested the decline when they could, especially in the face of overwhelming Ottoman armies. Here again though it's survival was not just a result of ERE greatness, but the existence of Tamerlane and his grudge against the Ottomans.
Certainly, but a weaker state would not have lived another half century from that. Heck, a weaker state would not have made it to that point.
That the most advanced country in the Christian world not be wracked with religious bigotry and purges, civil war and regicide? That it maintain the professional armies that had reversed their fortunes under Basil II? That they not destroy their art? Maybe that they not butcher enough Italian merchants to attract the ire of Venice and the 4th Crusade?
1) Greatly exaggerated. Especially given the ERE's ability to deal with Muslims better than the West would up to and including probably the last century.
2) Done by a few incompetent emperors with at least two prior to Alexius trying to undue that, and the (post-Isaac I) Comneni not having a good position with which to continue said undoing - though there was some effort made to do so.
3) Iconoclasm is not a reflection of standard operating procedure - and it might be noted, it lost.
4) Are we blaming the state or the fact mobs are psychotic by definition?
Manuel arrested a bunch of Italian merchants, but the riots of...1183, I think, are the responsibility of the state in the sense the king of France is responsible for the sack of Constantinople. Maybe less.
So we agree breaking up the regional armies and replacing them with mercenaries was a bad policy? Good. Even under the better of the Komnenus family it was still less effective than an army of your own citizens.
It was more effective than any army in the West or to the East despite that, and continued rule by the Comneni would have pushed it further in that direction rather than towards what Andronicus II did (to use an example of the "the state depended too much on mercenaries" taken to levels that can't be taken seriously).
Early modern European armies were mostly mercenaries. Picked as an example of what European armies in the age in which nations even remotely comparable in terms of national organization to the ERE existed.