Author: stevenattewell

Did medieval people think of wine as a sophisticated or luxury drink? If not, how did it get that image by modern times?

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

Wine’s luxury status then and now really depends on how prevalent wine-making is in a given region and thus how expensive wine is. In areas where wine grapes grow easily, it’s not considered a sophisticated or luxury drink per se, except at the top of the market. In areas in which they don’t, or where beer or other drinks predominate, wine is considered more of a rarity. 

Food history can be amazing like that.

Modern example: oysters. Oysters are an expensive luxury food, right? Even in places near oyster beds. But go to your supermarket or local fish market and price some out, and unless you’ve a lot more money than I have, you’ll go “well, I certainly can’t eat these every day.”

Except… not always the case in all times and all places. Before the pizza slice or the hot pretzel, you know what food was universally with New York City, the one consumed by all residents and damn near synonymous with the place as a whole, a symbol of the metropolis?

Oysters. Everybody ate them. All the time. There were street carts selling them everywhere. Every restaurant had them, they were the equivalent of having chicken fingers on the menu. People from Europe would come to NYC and be all “god damn, these people love their oysters.” They were a very democratic food, beloved by all classes and segments of society. (Except maybe people with a shellfish allergy.)

That lasted for a long time, but because we can’t have nice things, it stopped because we wrecked the Hudson and East rivers as well as their estuary, which at one point is estimated to have contained roughly half of all the oysters in the entire world. We ate’em all up and polluted the water so any new ones grown there aren’t safe to eat. And so now, these days, oysters there are a luxury food where once they were a food of the masses. They’re damn near a Veblen good in some ways, in fact.

Yep. Good example of how this stuff changes: today, lobsters are generally considered something of a delicacy and fairly pricey. In the 19th century, lobsters were food for poor people and criminals, because A. lobsters were crazy abundant and therefore cheap as all get out, and B. lobsters were considered bottom-feeders and thus unclean. 

What are some things an individual Teague monarch could do to improve their situation in the Riverlands?

hedrigal:

racefortheironthrone:

  1. Given that the Teagues’ greatest weakness was that they were disliked and frequentally faced rebellions, build a coalition, whether that’s through marriage alliances into the nobility, or political alliances with the merchant/burgher class by giving out town and city charters, or the like.
  2. Given that the Riverlands are historically underdeveloped, strengthen their own position – build roads and bridges to encourage trade, allow armies to march quickly from place to place, and block Ironborn raids downriver; build castles at geostrategic locations like the convergence of the Trident, expand state capacity especially when it comes to revenue and records-keeping. 

Thanks, I’m trying to help out with the Hidden History project that other guy is doing, and I want to come up with notes to talk about more Teagues than the three we know of who ruled for more than a day.

Cool. Keep in mind, though, from the WOIAF, it seems like the Teagues didn’t do this so much (especially with the charters, since the Riverlands has no cities), and got frequently overthrown. 

Anon Asks:

How much land would huge cities like Rome or Constantinople or Athens or the free cities in ASOIAF need to feed the population of just that urban city?

Great question! The answer is: large cities in any period of history, be it during classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, well into the Industrial Revolution, require a very large hinterland to provide the necessary food to feed their populations. 

On a general rule of thumb, you’d generally expect cities of those size to command the resources of the countryside around them for at least several day’s travel distance from the city (basically, as far back as you can reasonably get goods to market before they go bad).

However, all of the cities you mention are port cities, which changes the story somewhat: Rome drew its food supply not just from Italy but also from western North Africa etc., Constantinople drew its food supply both from nearby Anatolia and Thrace but also from Egypt, and the Free Cities can draw their food both from their hinterlands but also from Westeros or other parts of Essos. 

Did medieval people think of wine as a sophisticated or luxury drink? If not, how did it get that image by modern times?

Wine’s luxury status then and now really depends on how prevalent wine-making is in a given region and thus how expensive wine is. In areas where wine grapes grow easily, it’s not considered a sophisticated or luxury drink per se, except at the top of the market. In areas in which they don’t, or where beer or other drinks predominate, wine is considered more of a rarity. 

If scutage was one or two marks, how much was that worth and how often was that paid a year, I imagine that a professional soldiers are expensive and that doesn’t sound like much money for hiring troops full time

A mark was around 2/3 of £1, or roughly £578.00 in today’s money. So King John’s scutage of 3 marks (or roughly

£2) per knight’s fee in 1214 added up to £1,734 in today’s money. Given that the average yearly income in 1214 was around £2 ½, you can see why it provoked political resistance.

As for how often, scutage was usually levied on a campaign basis as opposed to a yearly basis, so it depended on how many separate campaigns were launched in a given year. 

What are your thoughts on the villains of the first two Spiderman movies by Raimii?

It’s a bit late, so I’ll keep it short:

Dafoe is incredible…when he’s out of the suit. The suit is not good b/c the frozen face mask basically cuts off major avenues for acting. To be fair, I don’t blame anyone for that – Spiderman came out in 2002, and back then unless you were at the very bleeding edge of tech over at WETA or something like that, you couldn’t really capture faces that well. 

Molina, likewise. The script sometimes gives him somewhat odd decisions for his character to make, but he sells the hell out of both the genuine, warm, mentoring scientist figure, and the twisted, embittered man who emerges from the accident.