Author: stevenattewell

Wait, Jon and Myles were romantic interests? I don’t remember anything romantic happening between them? What passage gives us that information?

It’s not any more spelled out than Loras and Renly were, but…

“He slipped inside the tent, leaving Griff to contemplate the gilded skull of his old friend. In life, Ser Myles Toyne had been ugly as sin. His famous forebear, the dark and dashing Terrence Toyne of whom the singers sang, had been so fair of face that even the king’s mistress could not resist him; but Myles had been possessed of jug ears, a crooked jaw, and the biggest nose that Jon Connington had ever seen. When he smiled at you, though, none of that mattered. Blackheart, his men had named him, for the sigil on his shield. Myles had loved the name and all it hinted at. “A captain-general should be feared, by friend and foe alike,” he had once confessed. “If men think me cruel, so much the better.” The truth was otherwise. Soldier to the bone, Toyne was fierce but always fair, a father to his men and always generous to the exile lord Jon Connington.“

Does it makes real sense that some of the great lords dont control cities directly? The Gardeners/Tyrells have the most populous region but even that they command loyalty of other lords, the Hightowers alone are far more powerful because of Oldtown, so i think its a world building mistake to not exist a city in the mander together with Highgarden. For the Arryns shouldnt be a city inside the vale close to the Eyrie? Greyjoys shouldnt be at Lordsport? Lannisport and sunspear makes sense to me.

I mean, yes, there should be a city on the Mander, or at least two, which is why my econ dev plan had that happen. 

However, I would caution against cities being seen as costless. A city is a large population that does not produce its own food in a world in which 90-95% of the population are needed to do agricultural labor, which requires a lot of food to be imported to it and riots if it that doesn’t happen, and which does not have a positive population growth rate, historically speaking, which means you need to continually import people as well. 

So while cities are certainly highly valuable, they are also something of a luxury commodity. (Which, fyi, is part of where GRRM’s math fails him again: cities of 500,000 are orders of magnitude bigger than almost all medieval cities.)

I was talking to a friend of mine who has had a longstanding interest in how medieval/renaissance warfare developed into modern warfare, and the stumbling blocks/obstacles encountered along the way. As I understand it, the standard bearer was not the same as the messenger who would speak to the opponent’s side to request either a parley, determine terms of surrender, etc. These messengers were not to be harmed under any circumstances, but that did not apply to standard bearers at all. Correct?

Absolutely. A messenger or herald was considered untouchable, because they were a diplomatic noncombatant. A standard bearer was a soldier and was all-too-touchable. 

What exactly was the mortality rate of standard bearers? Was it a prestigious position, or was it more like the Harrenhal of military positions? I can’t imagine that it was very easy to fight while holding an ungainly banner.

Very high, hence the custom that if the standard bearer falls, someone else picks it up and becomes the new standard bearer. 

And yes, it was both. Standard bearers were selected from the bravest soldiers in the army (since they needed to be willing to run into danger while being less able to fight) and the strongest (because they were fighting one-handed often). 

And there was a very high mortality rate as suggested above. But just to clarify, standard bearers could and did plant the flag in order to free up a hand if and when they needed to fight; these were brave men, not idiots. 

how/why did the italian city states decline?

Well, I tend to support the theories of Fernand Braudel, who argued that long-term geographic and climatological changes in the broader Mediterranean – the declining ability of Western and Central Asia and North Africa to export grain due to desertification – caused increasing economic problems (higher grain prices) at the same time that the shift to the Atlantic made Mediterranean trade less important. 

Reading your Great Council essays made me remember the Great Cause in Scotland after the deaths of Alexander III and Margaret, Maid of Norway. It’s especially interesting that Edward I was brought in to arbitrate because of his naked ambition for suzerainty over Scotland, though maybe John Balliol thought he wouldn’t be that hard to deal with. But from a comparative perspective does it make sense that Westeros never tried to involve a foreign power to help arbitrate succession disputes?

Well, Westeros as a whole didn’t have a succession dspute at a time when there was a powerful neighbor on the continent to ask. The Valyrian Empire was dead and done, the Volantine attempt to rebuild it was dead and gone, and none of the feuding Free Cities were powerful enough on their own for anyone to care about what they thought. 

Maester Steven, if you have a liddle look-see on JoannaLannister’s tumblr page at the art she has depicting charging Lannister knights, could you please explain to the untrained peasant (mwha) what, if ever, would a banner carrier be doing in the front lines of a charge? If this is unrealistic, how did a normal banner carrier function if his “unit” was ingaged with the enemy? Also, how many household knights, not guardsmen would a typical Lord Lannister employ? Thanks a million for everything!

I did see that art on @joannalannister‘s page, it was very cool. 

The standard bearer is there to make sure that everyone else knows/sees where to head towards in the chaos of battle, and to motivate them to keep going, because it was considered a huge shame to allow your standard to be captured in battle. 

As to how the standard carrier fought, they had a sidearm, but sometimes they would use the lance the standard was attached to. 

In terms of household knights, Tywin’s 500 was seen as a surprise, but a younger brother like Kevan has 200 under his command and pretty much everything baout Kevan is conventional. So for a Lord of Casterly Rock, somewhere in between there is more typical; Tymond Lannister arrived at the Great Council of 101 AC with 300 bannermen plus men at arms, so take that as you will. 

Sorry about that, Tumblr kept on insisting that my ask had a link in it (Where you bastard!), so I kept on deleting text until the ask went through… I wanted to ask, I read somewhere that the Agincourt archers used their mauls (the ones they used to drive stakes into the ground around their fixed positions) to attack the French knights. How effective would such a maul be against an armoured knight, when compared to an actual warhammer? – Thank You, RSAfan.

They didn’t use the mauls to piece armor or anything like that, they used them to knock the knight down, and then proceeded onwards to the stepping on them and driving pointy bits of metal into soft places until they died.