Author: stevenattewell

Why does stannis think that the stormlords are traitors who owe him fealty over renly? For all that he is the elder baratheon, is renly to whom they swore featly as the lord paramount of the stormlands. Thanks!

Well, let’s ask Stannis:

“It was justice,” Stannis said. “A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward. You were a hero and a smuggler.” He glanced behind at Lord Florent and the others, rainbow knights and turncloaks, who were following at a distance. “These pardoned lords would do well to reflect on that. Good men and true will fight for Joffrey, wrongly believing him the true king. A northman might even say the same of Robb Stark. But these lords who flocked to my brother’s banners knew him for a usurper. They turned their backs on their rightful king for no better reason than dreams of power and glory, and I have marked them for what they are. Pardoned them, yes. Forgiven. But not forgotten.”

Stannis claims that he is the rightful king, as Joffrey is not Robert’s son, and he is Robert’s oldest brother. And he quite rightly points out that Renly has no legitimate claim to the Iron Throne and isn’t bothering to put forward one, so the lords who are trying to make Renly king have no excuse. 

You’ve talked about how the Redwynes are not disparaged for being in trade because of their long and noble lineage. Would you say that applies to other such houses as well. I’m thinking of the Hightowers, the Lannisters of Lannisport, the Manderlys etc

The Hightowers, certainly. The extent of the Manderlys’ commercial orientation is unclear. The Lannisport Lannisters’ status I think is more reflected by them being a cadet branch than anything commercial. 

Toying with the idea of an empire/kingdom established by conquest in which the founder granted small amounts of land to his ordinary soldiers in return for continuing military service. Partly driven by geographic/cultural factors, but primarily by desire to undercut existing noble power/not create competing power structures, creating a feudal yeoman/armsman class. Is there an historical example of this? How much land would be required to support a man-at-arms (med-heavy foot or light cav)?

Yeah, there’s historical examples: see here and here.

In terms of how much land, see here. 

Why did much of the Western Roman Empire adopt Latin, while the Eastern Roman Empire remained Greek speaking even after Roman conquest?

So before the Roman Empire included the east, Greek was the “lingua franca” of the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and because the Roman elite respected Greek as a philosophical and literary language, they left it alone in the East and indeed made it one of the two official languages of the Empire. So for a Greek-speaking resident of the East, you could still continue your day-to-day life and even interact with the Roman state, all without having to learn Latin. 

The same factors weren’t really there in the west, where there were a lot of different languages, none of which had the prestige and thus utility of Greek. And while the Roman Empire didn’t try to impose Latin on conquered people in the West, because Latin was the only language of administration, law, military, and business, there was an incredibly strong incentive for the children of the provincal elite to be educated in Latin so that they could become Romanized and advance in society. 

That being said, it should be noted that bilingualism in elite circles was the rule in both the West and East through the 5th Century CE. Indeed, for a long time, because Latin was considered the “language of power,” there were complaints that the study of Latin by high-status residents of the Eastern Empire was harming the quality of traditional education in Greek rhetoric. 

Did Masters or Journeymen who couldn’t get a licensed spot for a shop in a town or city ever set up outside of the city for production? I remember you said once that Masters often took more apprentices than there ever would be positions for, because of the cheap labor. That sounds like it would lead to a glut of journeymen.

Good question!

Yes, they did. To quote Friedrichs’ Early Modern City:

“…This was especially the case in the rapidly expanding metropolitan centers with their sprawling outer districts – the suburbs and faubourgs outside the walls where work and residence patterns were particularly hard to control. Unlicensed artisans and unskilled workers abounded in these outer neighbourhoods, where overlarge parishes and underdeveloped institutions made it difficult to keep track of exactly who lived there.”

This was, however, a somewhat risky strategy, because (for the most part) you still had to get your goods into the city, which meant coming under the legal jurisdiction of the city once again. Not only would imported goods usually be taxed, but trading in unlicensed goods could lead to legal penalties. 

heya, love the blog and you got me into history, so i wanted to ask you a question: rome unified most of europe and parts of asia and africa during the rupublic/empire. after the fall of Rome itself why didnt the italians reconciled their territory? why did the byzanthines and the lobards and venice didnt try to get their historical birthright?

Well, I think your question sort of answers itself. Italy wasn’t unified after the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire because there were multiple claimants to the territory. 

In the Gothic War alone, you had the Byzantines (backed up by Huns, Lombards, Slavs, and other foreign allies) against the Ostrogoths (who were in turn supported by the Franks, Burgundians, Alamanni). However, that statement makes things seem way more straightforward than they actually were, because those allies often became their own sides, as we see from the Franks, who turned on the Ostrogoths and almost succeeded in defeating both them and the Byzantines if it hadn’t been for a very timely outbreak of dysentery, and from the Lombards, who started out as Byzantine allies and ended up conquering most of Italy soon after Justinian’s death. 

And complicating the “historical birthright” narrative is the fact that the Ostrogoths were legally allies of the Empire, a lot of their leaders had received a Roman education and worked hand-in-hand with the Roman Senate, the surviving Roman bureaucracy, and the Catholic Church (despite the fact that they were personally Arians rather than Chalcedonians), so could arguably be considered to have as much of a claim to said birthright as the Greek-speaking, Orthodox Byzantine invaders. 

How common was it for a master blacksmith (like Tobho Mott) to move to another city and practice his skill. Were there guild restrictions on moving to safeguard their monopolies? Would he be restricted from teaching certain things to foreign apprentices? And more importantly how would they enforce this?

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

It’s more that guilds managed the distribution of workers, so that there weren’t too many workers in a given area relative to how much work there was for them. Now, masters tended to have much more freedom than journeymen in terms of where they could go, because that’s part of what it meant to be a master, but there were still internal pressures to not overcrowd the market.

So it would depend on the local economy. If there is a scarcity of local blacksmiths, a foreign master would be readily welcomed, as masters were required to train apprentices and employ journeymen, so a new master would (over time) create new jobs in that industry. If there were a lot of local blacksmiths, there might be resistance, b/c the argument would be that additional masters would split the work too much.

In terms of enforcement, this is where guild charters came in: guild regulations had the force of law within that industry, so if you tried to move to a city after being refused permission (and thus weren’t licensed), you could be sued in court and the local gendarmes could expel you from the city. 

There are excellent fictive examples of this in two of Guy Gavriel Kay’s works, The Lions of Al-Rassan and The Sarantine Mosaic.

In the latter, a doctor from a numbers-filed-off Persia moves to numbers-filed-off Constantinople under Justinian, and hangs out his shingle with absolutely no goddamn clue of the local laws, regulations, and culture surrounding such things, because he’s a foreigner from a small town.

He then has to contend with the fact that he’s angered his local colleagues, he’s set up a commercial business in a residential home (yes, they had zoning laws back then! Often very stringent ones!) that is disrupting street traffic, and that some of his medical techniques may violate local laws and religious custom, which draws unwelcome attention from the church as he’s an unbeliever in a state with a state religion.

One of the things he does to smooth things over is… agree to give lectures and talks on basic medical techniques to students, a task that none of the local masters want to do at all but which they’re required by their guild charter to devote time too for the good of the state and the profession.

I like the “none of the local masters” wanting to teach students; history changes everything, except certain aspects of academic culture.