So as I discuss here, it’s not entirely clear quite how the sequence goes.
What we know is that the Red Kings of the Boltons were the last rivals of the Starks to bend the knee, we know that Rogar the Huntsman “swore fealty to the King of Winter and sent his sons to Winterfell as hostages, even as the first Andals were crossing the narrow sea in their longships,” we know that “King Theon Stark, known to history as the Hungry Wolf, turned back the greatest of these threats, making common cause with the Boltons to smash the Andal warlord Argos Sevenstar at the Battle of the Weeping Water,” and we know that “after the defeat of the Boltons, the last of their Northern rivals, the greatest threats to the dominion of House Stark came by sea.”
Two of the three pieces of evidence suggests that the Boltons surrendered before or just as the Andals attacked the North, but the third suggests the opposite, as the use of the phrase “common cause” suggests that the Boltons were still independent during that initial battle with Andal invaders.
There’s a couple different possibilities: one is that Rogar bent the knee to get military support from Theon to defeat Argos Sevenstar. Another, as you suggest, is that Theon turned on Rogar after the battle, taking advantage of their exhaustion. A third is that Theon’s support might have prompted Rogar to bend the knee freely after the battle, seeing the existential threat that the Andals posed.
I think there were several factors. The first is that communication between armies isn’t good at the best of times – look at what happened when Jaime and Tywin (or Jaime’s cavalry and Jaime’s infantry) got separated, for example. Unless both parties have a rookery that both know to write to (and even then, ravens can go awry), you’re down to riders trying to get across hundreds of miles of very dangerous territory. This only gets more complicated when Robb takes the goat path into the Westerlands and is essentially behind enemy lines, or when Roose is on the march from the Twins to Harrenhal and isn’t near a rookery.
The second is that communications can be controlled. Roose is in a very good opportunity to dictate the narrative of how the Green Fork went down, and when he’s both at the Twins and Harrenhal, he can control what goes out by raven. You would need a subordinate to have recognized that Roose intentionally threw the battle rather than making a forgiveable mistake, be willing to be wholly insubordinate by informing on his commanding officer to the king in violation of chain of command, and then get a rider all the way to Robb Stark without being noticed, and be believed when that rider gets there.
The third has to do with expectations and perceptions. Roose Bolton stayed within the general framework of his orders at the Green Fork – he made a bunch of bad tactical choices, from failing to carry through with his night march to leaving the high ground to firing on his own men, but he didn’t violate Robb’s orders, and most importantly, Roose’s actions achieved the intended strategic effect by engaging with Tywin and allowing Robb to relieve Riverrun before Tywin could move to block him. So Robb doesn’t have any reason to perceive what happened at the Green Fork than the necessary sacrifice he thought it was.
Likewise, when Roose takes Harrenhal, he could plausibly say that A. it was the major enemy asset in the theater of war so it was good sense to take it, B. an allied commander had asked him to do it, and C. he wasn’t given orders to the contrary. Robb doesn’t have any reason to see this action as treasonous, and indeed the victory helps to obscure the pattern of Roose’s actions. It also helps that Robb is a bit distracted by Edmure’s actions at the time.
It’s not until Duskendale that Robb has something that really rings false, and Robb immediately picks up on it, recognizing that Duskendale is a target of no strategic value:
When they brought him word of the battle at Duskendale, where Lord Randyll Tarly had shattered Robett Glover and Ser Helman Tallhart, he might have been expected to rage. Instead he’d stared in dumb disbelief and said, “Duskendale, on the narrow sea? Why would they go to Duskendale?” He’d shook his head, bewildered. “A third of my foot, lost for Duskendale?”
But here’s where Roose’s control of communications kicks in. Sitting at Harrenhal, Roose is the one sending Robb information about what happened. So Roose constructs an alternative narrative in which he had nothing to do with Duskendale:
“Your Grace is too kind. I suffered grievous losses on the Green Fork, and Glover and Tallhart worse at Duskendale.”
“Duskendale.” Robb made the word a curse. “Robett Glover will answer for that when I see him, I promise you.”
“A folly,” Lord Bolton agreed, “but Glover was heedless after he learned that Deepwood Motte had fallen. Grief and fear will do that to a man.”
Robb has no way of knowing this isn’t true, because Roose made sure that the men who could have contradicted him were either killed or captured. The only people present when Roose gave the orders to take Duskendale – through a raven, so it’s not like any of the men at Harrenhal could have talked to Glover’s army and heard about new orders, and even then those men were almost all Freys and Bolton men by that point – wereArya and Qyburn.
The only, only way Robb could have heard differently is if Robett Glover had turned the ship around at Duskendale and headed for the Twins instead of White Harbor and gotten there ahead of the Red Wedding. Even then, odds are that Robett would have been seen as a rash incompetent looking to excuse his folly by making a scandalous accusation at his forgiving commanding officer.
But even if Robb had believed Robett, the 5,000 Stark loyalists in Roose’s army were dead or captured, and Roose and Walder had Robb outnumbered two to one. The damage was already done.
(They’re all nerdy questions, anon. That’s why they’re good.)
So I did a bit of thinking about it here, but why not go into more detail about how we might go about differentiating the armies of the different kingdoms?
So here’s what I’d do:
the North:
Bonus to charge attacks – whether we’re talking about the Dance of the Dragons or the War of Five Kings, the North is most successful when it uses devastating shock tactics, and least successful when its on the defensive (with the exception of Moat Cailin).
New Unit: Northern heavy cavalry. My thinking is that Northern heavy cavalry have an increased chance to cause routs or eliminate enemy commanders, but must pursue fleeing enemies.
the Vale:
Bonus to fortifications – as we see with the Bloody Gate, the Vale fares best by building strong walls and making the enemy attack them, inflicting heavy casualties. Thus, Vale units gain two times the normal advantage from fortifying.
the Riverlands:
Bonus to scorched earth tactics – as we see with the various wars of the Riverlands, the Riverlanders are very good at severing supply lines, destroying everything in the line of march, and then whittling down the enemy. So I would give the Riverlands an automatic Pillage ability, allowing them to strip resources and move at the same time.
the Iron Islands:
Bonus to marine operations: all Ironborn naval units are both warships and transport ships, reflecting the longships’ capacity to quickly land reavers, attack, and then flee.
New Unit: Longship. Can ignore minimum water levels, sail on both ocean and rivers.
the Westerlands:
Bonus to infantry: the Westerlands have the best-trained pike levies in Westeros, so they get a bonus to unit discipline and attack power of their hand-to-hand infantry units.
the Stormlands:
bonus to artillery: the Stormlands canonically have a combat doctrine of being the best archers plus lots of castle-building, so I’d give their archers increased range and accuracy, doubled when they’re fortified.
the Reach:
best heavy cavalry: Reach knight units are stronger than the norm, and have a bonus to unit discipline, representing their devotion to the codes and disciplines of chivalry.
bonus to recruitment/unit size/number of units: to represent the Reach’s larger population.
Dorne:
best light cavalry: Dornish cavalry has the highest movement speed of any unit, and gets additional bonus when flanking or counter-attacking.
New Unit: Dornish cavalry. Only cavalry unit that can attack with both ranged weapons (throwing spears) and hand-to-hand (lances).
It depends on the time and place, but often the position of executioner was a patronage position, and not a particularly desirable one, so you got people who weren’t very good at their job and weren’t hugely interested in being good at their job. For example, the infamous Jack Ketch:
Jack Ketch was Charles II’s executioner and was so astonishingly bad at his job that he became a figure of both hatred and mirth to the London public, such that to this day his name is a synonym for death, executioners, and Satan himself, and he became a bad guy in the Punch & Judy shows. (Yes, some of the research here started with Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch) For example, this is how Ketch carried out his job when it came to Lord William Russell:
“On that occasion, Ketch wielded the instrument of death either with such sadistically nuanced skill or with such lack of simple dexterity – nobody could tell which – that the victim suffered horrifically under blow after blow, each excruciating but not in itself lethal. Even among the bloodthirsty throngs that habitually attended English beheadings, the gory and agonizing display had created such outrage that Ketch felt moved to write and publish a pamphlet titled Apologie, in which he excused his performance with the claim that Lord Russell had failed to “dispose himself as was most suitable” and that he was therefore distracted while taking aim on his neck.”
To be more specific, he took three swings with the axe and couldn’t pull it off, and then finished the job with a saw. It takes a special kind of bastard to write, print, and distribute a pamphlet to avoid blame for botching an execution, and to hit on “the dead guy sucked at being executed” as the excuse. And this was not a one-time thing: Ketch botched the execution of the Duke of Monmouth, taking no less than five whacks of the axe to finish the job (apparently because Ketch hadn’t bothered to sharpen the axe ahead of time) and had to be hustled out of town for a while because the London mob wanted to lynch him.
Well, as I’ve talked about with the Starks and personal justice, I think it’s more a statement of judicial philosophy than moderation per se.
The Starks essentially invert the normal order of medieval justice as Foucault saw it: rather than making the royal body symbolic and larger than life, it’s made literal as the king becomes the executioner; rather than dwelling on the obliteration and humiliation of the body, the emphasis is on one precise strike with a Valyrian steel sword, almost an artisan guillotine.
In some ways, it’s actually most reminiscent of the classical Greek model that Hesiod wrote about, where lords and kings are local warlords who people come to lay their cases in front of, because they’re the only people around who can enforce judgement. In that situation, carrying out the execution yourself is a dramatic political display, showing off the personal strength and martial prowess of the king which is the proof of their right to rule.
But I think there’s another purpose to Ned’s thing about “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.” One of Hesiod’s major, major complaints is that the lordly system of justice is corrupt – given that the judges are literal strongmen, they don’t really give a damn about fairness, so the parties come to them with bribes disguised as tribute, and the king sides with the rich man over the poor man. By having the king be personally implicated in the execution, he’s making a public statement that the king is sure that the condemned deserves to die (because if the king kills someone who’s innocent, that’s when supernatural retribution kicks in…) and that therefore the justice system is honest.
So I think that it’s something that historically worked in favor of the Starks. As with the Justmans, personally identifying the Starks with justice created a strong bond of loyalty between subject and sovereign. And the Starks lived up to their own mythologizing: hence Ned going in person to Bear Island to chop off the head of Jorah Mormont, showing to everyone who sees or hears about his progress from Winterfell that the Stark will uphold the law against anyone, even the lords.
Historical sources on that kind of thing are extremely sketchy and yield wildly varying estimates – 41 executions a year in Toulouse in the 14th century according to one source; 11-13 a year in Florence in the 14th century but 7-8 per year in the 15th versus 1-5 in Nuremberg, Lyon, or Frankfurt according to another; yet another source says that Avingon’s 15-30 executions per year was low by comparison to other medieval cities. That kind of variation isn’t unusual in premodern studies, btw; accurate statistics being very much a key element of modernity, both the child of and the result of the rise of the nation-state.
Continued after the cut, because this is going to get gruesome.
One thing that pretty much every scholar both before and after Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) agrees on is that frequency isn’t the real story here: for unlike executions after the Enlightenment, medieval executions were meant to be exemplary. As Foucault puts it:
“The public execution is understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the cermonies by which power is manifested…in punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince…it requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person…”
“The public execution…is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. it restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular…it deploys before all eyes an invincible force….the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measur,e but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punihsment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its instrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it…it is the prince…who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken.”
For those reasons, medieval executions were public by design – the masses had to bear witness to the power of the monarch, hence why places of execution were public, prisoners were transported in the open air, and crowds were encouraged (although attempts were made to control them).
Moreover, deaths were also designed to be as humiliating and violent as possible: the condemned being stripped of clothes or hair or other badges of rank or being made to wear symbolic garments was often a part of the process; blurring the lines between torture and execution, the process was made as drawn-out and lingering as possible, and efforts were made to combine many different forms of “almost-deaths” as possible (medieval hangings or drownings for example, were often cut short of death); the human body would be opened up, divided, and mutilated, and as with the “almost-deaths,” great care was taken to try to keep the condemned alive and conscious for as much of the process as possible, so that they would see and be aware of their own obliteration. Some particularly skilled executioner/torturers took pride, for example, in being able to keep a man alive long enough to see his own heart burned in front of him.
In other words, terror was meant to do the work of frequency – if the medieval state with its extremely limitedlaw enforcement capacity couldn’t demonstrate that there was a good chance that you would be caught and punished, it was going to do its level best to ensure that the fear of what would happen to you if you lost the lottery of crime was as intense as possible.
Oh yes, how could I have forgotten John Sayles? Brother From Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out, Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, Men With Guns…so many good movies.
I like Zulu like I like H.P Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard – it’s a guilty pleasure, or in the parlance of Tumblr, a “problematic fave.” The acting and dialogue is crackling (especially a young Michael Caine), the period details are on-point (although not without some odd changes from the recorded events), the action is thrilling, the cinematography is great…
But at the end of the day, you have to acknowledge that the protagonists of the film, the people you’re meant to be cheering on, are a bunch of imperialists with no casus belli at all (who fought with who modern rifles, cannons, Gatling guns, and rocket batteries, although only the first was used at Rorke’s Drift) who are killing hundreds of Zulu who were fighting for their independence on their own land, armed largely with assegai and iklwa.
All this is to say that Zulu is one of the most imperialist movies of the post-WWII era, which is problematic, as I’ve said above.
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