With no explanation, label text_A→text_B with either "DON'T KNOW", "NO" or "YES".
text_A: By the time he became emperor he had chronic gout, but still maintained his regimen of daily walks He met challenges with impulsive cruelty, persecuting the nobility and ordering an orgy of torture; blinding was a favoured punishment for crimes real or imagined. He filled the senior court and state positions with nonentities. Within months the land laws of Basil ;II were dropped, under pressure from the Anatolian aristocracy. "Devoid of any semblance of moral fibre" he would grant any concession. Favouritism failed to win him friends and he persecuted the nobility when he felt threatened by conspiracy. The start of the decline of the Byzantine Empire has been linked to Constantine's accession to the throne. His reign has been described as "an unmitigated disaster", "a break up of the system" and causing "a collapse of the military power of the Empire".
text_B: Could the emperor have feasibly hidden his weakened state from a childhood friend who insisted on brisk walks through the forests of their youth?
YES.