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Regarding your advice to Bittersteel to seize Lys, Myr, Tyrosh & the Disputed Lands, don’t you think that is simply opening up a can of worms? After all, from what we know the Essossi city states don’t look kindly upon any power seizing control of multiple major cities at once( refer anti Volantis alliance in CoB). What’s stopping Bravos, Pentos, the anti Blackfyre factions of the Three Daughters & maybe even Volantis allying with the Targs & ganging up on the Company’s holdings in Essoss?

To quote HBO’s Rome, “if my last coin buys me a throne, it will have been worth it.” 

Yes, potentially I might have to deal with an Essosi alliance down the line. But the Triarchy lasted 34 years on its own, so it’s not like I don’t have time. 

And since what I’m actually after is Westeros, losing the Three Daughters after I take Westeros is an acceptable loss, but I could potentially buy off my opponents by giving them Myr and/or Lys and still be in the positive. 

Then again, if and when I’ve taken Westeros, I’ll have a lot more resources to hold onto the Three Daughters if I want to. 

Love the blog. You two do great work. There has been some speculation that Prince Duncan “the small,” was actually a dwarf. What effect would this have on the politics of Westeros? Would the decision to have Duncan break his betrothal and remove himself from the line of succession make more sense in this situation?

warsofasoiaf:

I’m not sure where that rumor came to be, but allow me to say this. If Prince Duncan the Small was a dwarf, I can almost guarantee we would have had that mentioned somewhere. Prince Duncan is known to have jousted at least once and participated with distinction as an officer in the Fourth Blackfyre Rebellion. I’d say that makes that theory incredibly unlikely.

If he was a dwarf, I would imagine a lot of Westerosi lords would quietly push for Aegon to set aside Duncan for Jaehaerys. Absent any other evidence to the contrary, I’d say Duncan didn’t wed Jenny of Oldstones for any other reason other than he loved her.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

Also, we now have images of Duncan the Small from WOIAF. It was a very simple joke, folks. Dunk is huge, so Duncan is “Small.” 

Anon Asks: Advice to Bittersteel

What advice would you have given to Bittersteel and the Blackfyres after he formed the Golden Company?

Oooh….now, this is a question I can sink my teeth into.

Bearing in mind that we don’t know almost anything about the Third Blackfyre Rebellion (or the Fourth for that matter), the first of the Blackfyre Rebellions in which the Golden Company fought, I do have some advice based on my studies of the Blackfyre Rebellions. 

Take the Disputed Lands First

Say what you like about Maelys the Monstrous – kinslayer, bit of a loser in the genetic lottery – he did have a good political mind. He understood that, if you were going to take Westeros, you needed a strong base on the continent to draw resources from. 

And I think that the Golden Company could have seized the Disputed Lands (including Tyrosh, Myr, and Lys), fairly effectively. For one thing, even after several losses in Westeros, they were able to almost pull it off under Maelys. For another, we see that under Bittersteel, the Golden Company was easily capable of taking out Qohor. 

Holding the Three Daughters and the land in-between (which doesn’t exactly look barren to me), would give the Golden Company far more resources than they would have already, which would allow for the recruitment of local troops, the hiring of more mercenary companies, a strong sellsail navy, and supplying the expeditionary force.

Taking the Disputed Lands would also demonstrate to the Blackfyre supporters on Westeros who had been burned by Daemon II that Haegon Blackfyre was a warrior like his father in contrast to the incompetent Aerys I. 

Build Up Logistical Infrastructure

To me, this is the one area where I think Bittersteel may have fallen short as he seems to have focused on winning field battles over anything else. Given that the Golden Company was, when you get right down to it, trying to conquer a continent with 10,000 men and no dragons, getting your logistics right is an absolute necessity.

First of all, you need to feed tens of thousands of men – you’re trying to win over Westeros, you don’t start that by commandeering all their food. Also, since you’re hoping to expand your army by enrolling loyalists into your ranks, not only do you need to feed your own, but you also need to feed them. 

Second, it’s even more crucial for arms, ammunition, and equipment. One of the few advantages that the Golden Company have going for them is that the quality of their infantry is generally better than most Westerosi forces. Now, you don’t have to equip and then train your new enrollees to the same standard, but it does open up a potential weakness – if your enemy can break your less disciplined contingents, they can really screw with your formations. Being able to arm your infantry to the standard of the Golden Company – and hopefully have time to train them – is a way to greatly improve your odds. 

Third, naval resources. Given that Bloodraven was focusing the whole of the royal navy on the Narrow Sea to prevent a crossing, being able to throw three city-states worth of ships into the mix is crucial not only to ensuring that your army can cross safely but also that you can keep a supply line open to Essos, allowing for reinforcements and resupply so that Bloodraven can’t simply wear you down. 

Take and Hold

This is my advice that runs most contrary to Blackfyre tradition. Rather than trying to go for King’s Landing right off the bat, I would urge the rebels to grab onto significant territory and try to hold onto it. 

Here’s why – back during the First Rebellion, Daemon looked like a real going concern in no small part because he had grabbed the better part of three of the Seven Kingdoms. His death and the flight from Westeros, and especially Daemon II’s contemptible failure at Whitewalls, has badly diminished the extent to which anyone would think that the Blackfyres have a shot at taking the crown.

But if the Blackfyres could, say, take and hold the Reach, the marcher lordships of the Stormlands, and maybe the Westerlands (given that Gerold is almost dead and Tywald’s in tight with the Reynes), and hold them for an extended period of time, that’s a clear sign that this is not another Daemon II, that the Blackfyres are not going away, and that the Targaryens might have lost the metaphorical mandate of heaven. 

At the same time, given that the Blackfyres are probably going into the fight outnumbered, it’s a wise move to force the Targaryens to attack, to bleed the loyalist forces dry in assaults on castle after castle, and then counter-attack at times and places where the superior discipline of the Golden Company can be of most use. 

Build A Counter-Establishment

Moreover, on the political side, holding onto territory allows the Blackfyres to do what Daemon I did best and what succeeding rebellions don’t seem to have emulated – build a political counter-establishment that really threatens the Targaryens. Haegon I should be crowned and acclaimed on Westerosi soil, he should be minting coins with his face on them, he should be levying taxes and dispensing law, if the Ironborn are still raiding the Reach and the Westerlands by this period he should help repel them or at least aid in the rebuilding, and anything else that becomes a king.

Because the greatest asset the Blackfyres have right now is that Haegon is a young man whereas Aerys I is in his 50s and in poor health, he’s an unpopular and incompetent king, Bloodraven’s a tyrant, and the succession is iffy. Haegon is the clean slate, the chance for a new beginning after 13 years of misrule. The more he can get the lords of Westeros to turn to him, the more likely ultimate victory will be his. 

In the Iron Islands, do you think that the various ship captains owe any feudal obligation to the lords, or are they more like sell-sails who have to follow the rules laid down by the lords if they wish to use the isles as a home port? When Balon calls the longships home, do they make a verbal agreement to sail under the Greyjoy flag/command? How did the Vikings operate in real life (if that is a good comparison)? Thanks for the effort.

I’m pretty sure it’s a feudal relationship. Granted, it’s one with a good deal of autonomy for the captains, since it’s a lot harder for the liege lord to keep an eye on their vassals at sea than it would be on land. 

As messed up as it is, do you think that the Slaver’s Bay and its people can survive without the institution of slavery? If I remember correctly their land was left all but infertile by their Valyrian conquerors and they import most of their goods from other lands. If they are left with nothing to export, how can they expect to get life sustaining goods in return?

Well, let’s start with the point that a society that can’t survive without the total dehumanization of six-sevenths of its population shouldn’t.

But to actually answer your question, yes I think they can. 

First of all, you’re not remembering correctly. The Meerenese coastland where the cedars were got eroded, but inland there are tons of farms and landed estates which feed the cities, especially along the Skahazadhan. And even if the soil was poor, there’s ways to fix that – better irrigation, better fertilization, anti-eroision planting and reforestation. There’s also a good bit of manufacturing – copper and salt mining, weaving, brick-making and pottery, etc. There’s plenty of commerce in things other than human beings. 

Second, you can’t trust Galazza Galare. In addition to maybe being the Harpy, she’s part of a whole invented culture that exists to legitimate and naturalize the slave system that was created in the Century of Blood. She’s a damn liar trying to sell Dany on the idea that Meereen has no other option than slavery, just like the liars in our own history who argued that the South couldn’t survive without slavery. 

Third, slavery has huge opportunity costs – all of the labor and money that gets spent in training the Unsullied or the sex-slaves of Yunkai or the gladiators of Meereen is money that can’t be spent on improving agricultural productivity or investing in new industries. 

A lot of people seem to think Dany is… not being serious when she talks about ending feudalism (“breaking the wheel”). Let’s say she is. Aegon used his dragons to conquer, but is there a way Dany could use her dragons to liberate the smallfolk in the same way she liberated the Meereenese slaves?

Well, keep in mind that’s show only. We haven’t really heard from her at all in the books about what she’d want to do in Westeros. 

In order for Dany to succeed, would she need to completely eradicate the master classes of Slaver’s Bay, or is there a more peaceful option?

Generally speaking, there’s really only two ways to prevent a revolution like Dany’s from going backwards – eliminate the population of the master class or eliminate what makes them a master class. 

The former involves a lot of revolutionary violence and/or exile. Deeply morally problematic, certainly, but a big part of Machiavelli’s chapter on cruelty in the Prince is an argument that it’s better to do it all at once, rather than leave things undone and deal with years and years of insurrectionary violence and reprisal-killing that will either bring down the new regime or require an incredibly heavy hand to put down, leading to more overall violence. 

The latter is much, much harder to pull off, because it means keeping alive a class that has an existential impulse to pull down the new order, and it requires a thorough power analysis – in other words, what made the master class the master class, and what would the newly-overthrown class need to get back on top, and how can we confiscate and redistribute the former while preventing them from getting their hands on the latter? And the reason why this is hard to pull off is that if you miss one element that gives the former masters a foundation to build power from, they’ll come roaring back with a vengeance. 

Let’s take Slaver’s Bay for an example. 

Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen were slave societies, and particularly intense ones at that. Numbers were not what was keeping the Good/Wise/Great Masters in power – they are in fact outnumbered about 6:1. This is an advantage for a new regime, because the supermajority of ex-slaves itself can help keep the ex-masters in check. But since that ratio obtained back during the old regime, numbers alone aren’t sufficient.

So what did the master classes have that kept them in power? 

  • Firstly, a monopoly on violence, which they used with abandon to put the slave population in a state of terror – Astapor especially is a comprehensive example of how you use conspicuous exemplary punishment to instill fear in a population. Likewise, you look at how the Sons of the Harpy operated in Meereen and how the Yunkish put down the new regime in Astapor, and it’s pretty clear that the Masters really prefer this method of control to any other. 
  • Secondly, a monopoly on the means of production. Now, in the old regime this meant control on the slave training system that was the basis for much of the economy in Slaver’s Bay. However, as we see in Dany I of ADWD, it also crucially meant control over farmland, pasturage, mines, workshops and machinery, and shipping – the building blocks of a post-slavery economy. 
  • Thirdly, a monopoly on capital. This refers primarily to liquid capital, which is especially important when you consider how the Yunkish use their cash to hire mercenaries and bribe the Volantines into intervening.

So the question before us is how should Dany have dealt with these factors when embarking on her crusade? 

Violence:

Here, Dany made some good moves initially. Liberating the Unsullied of Astapor reduced the Good Masters to a few dozen inexperienced cavalrymen. Destroying the Yunkish army of slave infantry and mercenaries left the Wise Masters unable to resist any of Dany’s demands. Similarly, her decision in Meereen to mobilize the ex-slaves into the Brazen Beasts, the Mother’s Men, the Stalwart Shields, and the Free Brothers is a good one, in that it allows the freedmen to potentially defend themselves rather than relying entirely on Dany’s own forces and especially her dragons.

However, Dany made some significant mistakes along the way, as I discussed in my Laboratory of Politics essay and on my tumblr. In Astapor, she pulled out all of the Unsullied, meaning that the new government had no military to defend itself with from usurpers. In Yunkai, she left the Wise Masters in place while removing tens of thousands of ex-slaves from the city, allowing the new regime to re-arm itself without interference at home. In Meereen, while the city is sacked, the pyramids of the Great Masters are untouched and the former military elite are able to hide underneath Dany’s amnesty to form the hard core of the Sons of the Harpy. Similarly, the ex-masters were seemingly not disarmed following the Siege, allowing them to strike at both civilians and isolated soldiers. 

What Dany should have done was to leave a decent-sized garrison in Astapor and Yunkai to support the new government in both Astapor and Yunkai, which she should never have left in the hands of the Wise Masters. These Unsullied could have also provided training to the men of military age who would have joined the Mother’s Men, Stalwart Shields, and Free Brothers, providing those cities with a more substantial defensive force. Moreover, with the garrisons giving more security to the regime, it’s more likely that the tens of thousands of refugees who followed Dany, complicating supply issues, spreading disease, and eliminating the land route to Volantis would have stayed home.

Means of Production:

This is much more of a mixed bag. While the destruction of the ruling class of Astapor gave the ex-slaves control of the entire city’s resources, Dany’s decision to have the Yunkish only a limited reparation of “a weapon, and as much food, clothing, coin, and goods as he or she can carry” guaranteed that the ex-slaves who followed her would be starving refugees in short order. In Meereen, while a few ex-slaves with skills were able to set themselves up as weavers or prostitutes, her decision to allow the Great Masters to live and retain all their property meant that “they had freed their slaves, yes … only to hire them back as servants at wages so meagre that most could scarce afford to eat.“ 

At the same time, with no way of supporting themselves independently, tens of thousands of ex-slaves were thrown onto a buyer’s labor market, driving down wages and creating such a degree of economic insecurity that ex-slaves with human capital turn to selling themselves back into slavery, which symbolically threatens Dany’s revolution even if the majority of ex-slaves remain free. 

What Dany needed to do in both Yunkai and Meereen is to expropriate the workshops, farms, and urban real estate of the former masters and distribute it to the former slaves, so that the freedmen have a baseline of economic security and have an alternative to throwing themselves on the labor market for whatever wages are going as a means of survival, and so that the former masters can’t use their economic power to coerce the ex-slaves and non-slave-holding free people into subservience or use those assets against Dany personally (in the case of Meereen’s navy). In addition, giving the former slaves workshops and farms gives them a very personal and active stake in the survival of the new order – as we see with Rylona Rhee, slaves who have economic independence get active politically, forming the leadership of a new political class. 

Capital:

As I’ve suggested above, control over access to liquid capital is very important, both because the ex-masters are going to use their cash to hire mercenaries, bribe Volantines, and entice non-slaveholders into joining the Sons of the Harpy, and because Dany badly needs that liquid capital to create a new economic order that doesn’t rely on the training and selling of slaves.

Yes, it’s true that Slaver’s Bay doesn’t have a huge amount of currently exploitable resources to build an economy on – copper being less valuable in a post-iron era, the Great Master’s damaging scorched-earth strategy, etc. But one of the things you can buy with money are saplings to plant in place of the vanished cedars and the burnt olive groves, tools and labor and materials to improve irrigation systems so that the hinterlands can make the cities more self-sufficient for food, equipment and labor to expand salt and copper mining and prospect for other minerals, ships to compete in non-slave based commerce, and so on.

More importantly, getting that cash out of the masters’ hands – as Dany belatedly does when she imposes the blood tax – means that they don’t have the resources to hire mercenaries, bribe anyone, or recruit Sons of the Harpy. 

Conclusion

In addition to all of this, we can’t neglect the importance of the symbolic. A big part of the reason why the Masters were able to hold such sway over their cities was that they could afford display of power and importance – hence the tokar, the crazy hair, and so on and so forth. While the Masters lost most of their human wealth with Dany’s revolution, they still had the money and the property with which to undergird their public image.

But take all of that away from them, reduce them to the level of just another ordinary citizen who has to work for a living, and you eliminate the mystique. Non only does the ex-slave not have to knuckle under to them to live, but the ex-non-slaveowner has no reason to show them political or social or cultural deference. Rather than being the one-and-former rulers revenging themselves on the occupier, they’re a bunch of impotent dead-enders. 

In that circumstance, Shavepate’s cultural revolution seems like the better bet – whether that’s a position in the Brazen Beasts, a job working in Dany’s palace, a seat on the ruling council, etc.

What is your evaluation of Tarvek Sturmvoraus?

Dicey question to ask someone with a Gil avatar…

Reminds me a lot of Kid Loki – a really smart person who struggles against his worser angels, but who is so habituated to manipulating people to accomplish things that he can’t stop himself from doing that to his friends and loved ones, as opposed to honestly communicating with them. Someone who assumes his bad reputation will doom his relationships, so preemptively alienates people rather than suffer rejection.

I don’t find his politics that appealing, though. Given what he knows of his own family, the idea that the Storm King monarchy/Fifty Families aristocracy is a good way to rule Europa is insane. Yes, I understand why Tarvek might think that he personally would be an enlightened monarch, but what I don’t get is why he doesn’t see there’s no way of preventing generations to come from becoming just as bad as the cousins he despises. 

And I still blame him for screwing up Agatha’s attempt to warn the Baron about the Other, exacerbating tensions between Wulfenbach and the Heterodyne in ways that led to a lot of unnecessary bloodshed at a time when efforts needed to be directed at the Other.