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Are there any other books/series you’d like to do a CBC-style analysis of if you had the time and the audience?

Tricky question. It would have to be a series that spoke to both my academic skills and my personal interests. There’s plenty of book series I adore that don’t quite speak to my academic skills – for example, I’m a huge fan of the Rivers of London series, but that series’ interest in London history, geography, architecture, folklore, etc. goes far beyond my knowledge base. 

In terms of non-book series, I write about the intersection of history, politics, and Marvel comics. It’s been a while since the last essay I’ve done (although I’ve got one half-done), but they’re a lot of fun to write and they scratch that itch. Mostly it’s been an issue of time and energy. 

Whats the population of Braavos? Can you guess? How many ships they have? Where they get the wood to make their ships?

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

  1. I’ve talked about the population here .
  2. Given that they’ve got more than Volantis and Volantis has 300-500 (according to ADWD, The Iron Suitor), I would guess that Braavos has between 400-600 ships. 
  3. They get the wood from the Braavosi coastline, or by trading for it.

One has to imagine that there’s a brisk lumber trade between the north and Braavos. Braavos is a quick jaunt across the narrow sea and the north has leagues and leagues of virgin forest. Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.

Sure, or to the east given the vast forests of Mussovy. 

Maybe, but Mossovy is WAYYYY the fuck out there. I think it might actually be the northern equivalent of a sea voyage from Braavos to Qarth, it’s that far away.

Actually, since I’ve busted out the map, New Ibbish might be a big lumber supplier. It’s got that huge wooden wall, which speaks to a people who have a great familiarity with lumber harvesting and processing, and they have access to the enormous forests of the Ifequevron,

I was more thinking the historical parallels to Russian pines.

Whats the population of Braavos? Can you guess? How many ships they have? Where they get the wood to make their ships?

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

  1. I’ve talked about the population here .
  2. Given that they’ve got more than Volantis and Volantis has 300-500 (according to ADWD, The Iron Suitor), I would guess that Braavos has between 400-600 ships. 
  3. They get the wood from the Braavosi coastline, or by trading for it.

One has to imagine that there’s a brisk lumber trade between the north and Braavos. Braavos is a quick jaunt across the narrow sea and the north has leagues and leagues of virgin forest. Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.

Sure, or to the east given the vast forests of Mussovy. 

Whta was the Lyseni Spring?

It’s not entirely clear, but from context, the Lyseni Spring seems to have involved a popular uprising against the Rogare family in Lys and an elite coup against the Rogare family in Westeros, partially because of the overweening power of the Rogare family which threatened the oligarchical republic and partially because the Iron Bank does not like competition:

“In the end, it was Larra Rogare and her wealthy, ambitious family who helped break the power of the regents and, almost certainly, that of Lord Peake. It was an inadvertent role they played, however, caught up as they were in the Lyseni Spring. This was a time when the Rogare Bank waxed greater than the Iron Bank, and so fell prey to the plots to control the king; they were blamed for many more acts than they were actually guilty of. Lord Rowan, then the Hand and one of the last regents, was accused of being complicit in their crimes and was tortured for information. Ser Marston Waters, now somehow Hand of the King in his place (Munkun, the only regent at this time besides Rowan, is reticent to discuss this in the True Telling), dispatched men to seize Lady Larra after having arrested her brothers. But the king and his brother refused to give her up, and were besieged in Maegor’s Holdfast by Waters and his supporters for eighteen days. The conspiracy eventually unraveled as Ser Marston—perhaps recalling his duty—attempted to fulfill his king’s command to arrest those who had falsely implicated the Rogares and Lord Rowan. Waters himself was killed by his own sworn brother, Ser Mervyn Flowers, when he attempted to arrest him.

… the Lady Larra Rogare of Lys. She was a great beauty of Valyrian descent, and seven years the prince’s elder when she wed him at nine-and-ten. Her father, Lysandro Rogare, was the head of a wealthy banking family whose power waxed even greater following the alliance to the Targaryens. Lysandro assumed the style of First Magister for Life, and men spoke of him as Lysandro the Magnificent. But he and his brother Drazenko, the Prince Consort of Dorne, died within a day of one another, beginning the precipitous fall of the Rogares both in Lys and the Seven Kingdoms.

Lysandro’s heir, Lysaro, spent vast sums in pursuit of power and fell afoul of the other magisters, even as his siblings became embroiled in plots to control the Iron Throne. After his fall, Lysaro Rogare was scourged to death at the Temple of Trade by those he had wronged. His siblings received less fatal punishments, and one among them—Moredo Rogare, the soldier who carried the Valyrian sword Truth—eventually led an army against Lys.” (WOIAF)

So this reads a lot like the rebellion against Piero II Medici after the death of Lorenzo Il Magnifico, which led to the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, combined with a bit of the Pazzi Conspiracy, combined by some of the intrigues during the regency of Henry VI. However, there’s a lot of detail we’re missing here about how the Rogare tried to control the Iron Throne, what role the Peakes played in all this, what Marston Waters was about, and so on. 

Hopefully when Fire and Blood Volume I comes out, we’ll get a fuller explanation of this incredibly complicated binational political event. 

Are all the men on ironborn longships freeborn fighters, or do you think some are thralls who solely row? We see Vic using such to Meereen with captured slaves he “freed”. And do you think all the regions were involved in Greyjoy’s Rebellion? If not, which ones weren’t? Did Jon presumably staying in KL mean the Vale wasn’t rallied? Did Doran not seek to build (fake) trust with the Iron Throne by sending levies? Did Mace only “provide” the Redwyne fleet? Did Hoster leave it to the Mallisters?

opinions-about-tiaras:

The ironborn definitely use thralls as rowers. They may or may not solely row, but they are certainly thralls.

From the Victarion preview chapter of TWOW:

The oarsmen were all big. One was a boy, one a brute, one a bastard’s
bastard. The Boy had been rowing for less than a year, the Brute for
twenty. They had names, but Victarion did not know them. One had come
from Lamentation, one from Sparrow Hawk, one from Spider Kiss. He could not be expected to know the names of every thrall who had ever pulled an oar in the Iron Fleet.


Victarion did not oft forgive a thrall for talking out of turn, but the
Boy was young, no more than twenty, and soon to die besides. 


If it made the three feel braver to believe they had a choice, let them
cling to that. Victarion cared little what they believed, they were only
thralls.

That strikes me as a case of the Ironborn social contract beginning to break down once you shift from the smaller-scale longships to actual warships, because otherwise the Ironborn very much separate out thrall’s work from freeborn work:

racefortheironthrone:

  1. I think that usually there’s a pretty strict code that there’s thrall’s work and Ironborn’s work and the two should not be mixed. Hence why Euron’s crew is an aberration.
  2. The Reach, the North, the Westerlands, the Riverlands, the Stormlands, and the Crownlands were definitely involved. We don’t hear anything about the Vale or Dorne tho. 

“Amongst the ironborn, only reaving and fishing were considered worthy work for free men. The endless stoop labor of farm and field was suitable only for thralls.” 

Incidentally, this also suggests that argument about the Ironborn having larger army #s are wrong, because if they have to resort to thralls to fill out the oars of a ship a third the size of mainlander warships, no way in hell they have 30,000 men under arms.