As someone with a distant relative who appears to have died in a Confederate Prisoner of War camp (he disappeared into Belle Isle and hasn’t been seen since), thank you for your consistent criticism of the “Lost Cause” narrative that dominates much of the Civil War historical fiction genre. I dislike holier-than-thou moralists just as much as the next person, but seriously, come on.

You’re quite welcome.

Greetings Maester Steven, In A Laboratory of Politics, Part V, you trace a parallel between the Volantene society and Byzantium, naming them both slave societies. Volantis is undoubtedly one, but what makes you call Byzantium a slave society rather than a society with slaves? Isn’t that parallel a bit exaggerated, given that slavery is far more widespread in Volantis than everywhere else in medieval Europe? As for the Byzantines, could you point me at some historiography regarding the matter?

Byzantine slavery was a direct outgrowth of Roman slavery, and Rome was undoubtedly a slave society, with anwhere between 4.6-19.3% of the population enslaved (see Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, 2011). Specifically on Byzantium, a huge, huge part of Byzantium’s Black Sea trade was in slaves, and Byzantium not merely acquired slaves by the tens and not hundreds of thousands at a time for use in a variety of industries at home, but also sold slaves widely across the Mediterranean, there were slave markets in many Byzantine towns and cities (the one in Constantinople was known as the “Valley of Lamentations”). So I think it counts.

For more on this, check out Youval Rotman’s Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (2009), and Hadjinicolaou-Marava’s’s Rercherches Sur La Vie Des Esclaves Dans Le Monde Byzantin (1950), which are both important monographs in their own right but should also provide some useful bibliography.

Response to your answer about the Cornwell Civil War books, it maybe the author just likes being a contrarian about character’s origins and presenting a-typical views of historical periods. His major series I’ve read is very like this concerning the main character and the Christian Church. In addition some abolitionists were quite nasty people as well.

First, I have no patience for contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism.

Second, considering the way that the Lost Cause has absolutely dominated the popular historical memory of the Civil War, there’s nothing contrarian or atypical about the Starback Chronicles. If anything, it’s rather cliche in the long, long history of the genre of Civil War historical fiction.

Third, while I’m sure some abolitionists might have been “quite nasty people” as individuals, what made them a group was their common commitment to the abolition of slavery. So when the one stand-in for abolitionists in a series is a sneering villain, I’m going to side-eye the hell out of that series.

Do you consider the Night’s Watch monastic.

The Night’s Watch Oath is pretty close to a bunch of monastic Rules, so yeah.

Do you prefer Star Wars canon or Legends?

Never got into the Star Wars Extended Universe stuff.

Where in the world would Ser Marston Waters get the idea to besiege his own Monarch, knowing that he is ultimately screwed when he lets them go. Or screwed if any of Aegon’s supporters, family members, and allies demanded he be released. This is his KING for goodness sake! The ruler of Westeros! He pretty much would have thought he signed his own death warrant doing that. Is there anything similar like that that happened in real life history?

This is something I really want from Fire and Blood Volume I, because you get the impression that politics were sliding rapidly into chaos – Hands of the King being tortured, Queens assassinated, everyone in charge dying, whatever the Lyseni Spring was – but we don’t have the details to explain how A led to B which gave us C.

But yes, it’s happened. The trick is being willing to kill the king and replace him, or keep the king a prisoner, afterward.

How common was it for a King to lead an army but let another command it during battle like what Henry Tudor did at Bosworth and Stoke Field?

Not uncommon, depended on how good a given king was at military command. Having a King be there on the field was good for morale, but not every king was a great tactician.

As a fan of Cornwell, who hasn’t read the civil war series, could you elaborate on why its terrible, i know it shows the viewpoint of the South , but does it show it in a too sympathetic light or fails to emphasize the injustices perpetuated by the South in trying to preserve slavery by war? I would love to hear your thoughts, thank you!

Cornwell either doesn’t get the role that slavery played in the war, or really badly mishandles it, because when your heroic POV character is a Northerner fighting for the South, and your Badass Mentor figure is best friends with his slaves and treats them equally if not better than whites, and your Sneering Bad Guys are militant abolitionists…I start to side-eye you heavily.

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Hello everyone! Just wanted to share a bit of personal news: my prosthetic finally arrived, so I am now capable of ambulation for the first time since mid-July. In terms of blogging, I will have a bit less free time for the next 4-5 weeks or so as I’ll be doing physical therapy in order to learn how to walk again. However, work continues on the Politics of Dorne Part I (doing a bit of research by…

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On the question of the decline of Italian city-states, I would suggest that finding other sea routes to India/Spice Islands also contributed, since it reduced the control that Italian cities had over the sea routes to the east.

That’s what I was referring to by the “shift to the Atlantic” – it includes both conquest/trade with the Americas and conquest/trade with the east by going around Africa.