Not really, no. If anything I think the problem is that retellings have tried to go too serious, mounting any number of “gritty and realistic” efforts (the Guy Ritchie one sort of counts, but the 2004 Antoine Fuqua production was a real offender on that score) similar to how they’ve tried to tack with Robin Hood movies. 

Gritty realism is not what’s interesting about the Arthurian cycle: rather, I’d argue it’s the surreal, dreamlike mysticism, where monsters anf fairies and witches and wizards abound and where barely-disguised pagan deities lurk in the woods, and the hothouse melodrama of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Iseult, Gawain and Ragnelle, are what make it click. 

That’s why, IMO, John Boorman’s Excalibur is still the best film adaptation, even after 37 years. 

I’ve kind of gone back and forth on this, to be honest. 

1. The Hightowers got rich because they had the oldest city in Westeros that controlled the trade of one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, and because they have a quite large (if occasionally narratively forgotten) trading and war fleet. 
2. The Velaryons fell from a position of influence, because much of the source of their wealth was destroyed during the Dance – a third of their fleet was lost at the Battle of the Gullet, then Spicetown and High Tide was torched, as were most of the Sea Snake’s treasures from Essos. Because they lost both physical and liquid capital in the same moment, they didn’t have the capacity to rebuild the former so as to regain the latter. And then to cap it off, they backed the Targaryens during Robert’s Rebellion and most of their ships were destroyed in the storm at Dragonstone when Dany was born.

It depends a lot what period you’re talking about, because Roman tax policy changed a lot. The late Roman Republic did see a lot of tax exemptions and an insufficient bureaucracy which led to the rise of predatory tax farmers, but Augustus completely transformed the taxation system – establishing a population census and creating a corps of imperial bureaucrats to assess and collect taxes.

By the late Roman Empire, there was an increasing problem of increasing inequality leading to fewer free citizens paying taxes (and more and more slaves and serfs who were taxable property) and wealthy landowners bribing tax collectors, governors, and even emperors into letting them out of paying their taxes. (Incidentally, this contributed significantly to Rome’s increasing difficulties in keeping a standing army in the field.) 

Camorr being a stand-in for Venice, its ruling class are primarily merchantile. The prejudice against trade historically was prominent among noble classes whose wealth primarily came from agriculture, which wouldn’t work in a cash-rich, land-poor city-state like Camorr. 

Statuory tax rates tended to be higher in the Middle Ages – compare the medieval tenth to the Roman 1% wealth tax – but the effective tax rate could be much lower, because:

1. the medieval state, especially in the early Middle Ages, tended to have a much less efficient tax collection bureaucracy than the Roman Empire, so quite often people got away with tax evasion (especially in the case of smuggling goods that are normally subject to excise taxes or customs duties). 
2. there were significant and quite wealthy sections of the population – namely the nobility and the clergy – who were exempt from taxation, which narrowed the tax base. 

For agriculture or for gunpowder manufacturing? Because I would say fairly late in both cases. Large-scale quano mining for fertilizer didn’t start until the 19th century. 

Robert. 

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Hey folks, I want to let people know that, now that Volumes I and II of Race for the Iron Throne are in print, my editor and I are working on Kickstarter fulfillment: first, we’re working on putting in orders for all the people who ordered print copies, which we’ll ship directly to their addresses; second, we’re also putting in orders for people who ordered signed copies, which will be shipped…

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