Just a backup in advance of the detumblring
Sure, there were tax collectors who got too greedy and wound up dead or replaced by someone – although the thing about greedy tax collectors is that they’re usually good at bribing their way out of trouble.
But smart tax collectors learned to diversify their business – like branching out into financing by loaning people money to cover their tax bill…
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I’ve done a little for Graphic Policy in the past. They are cool people, and they like good writing.
What was the medieval view of PTSD? Any recognition, however limited, of the phenomenon? Have any 1st person accounts (eg. diary entries, paintings, poems) survived to today?
Man, I am nowhere near an expert enough to give you a good answer. But to the best of my knowledge, medieval society viewed what we could call PTSD through the lens of the virtues and vices – namely courage and cowardice, or courage and wrath.
And that kind of attitude was pretty dominant up to and through WWI – it took a while for the army hierarchy, let alone the wider society, to understand that “shell shock” was something different from cowardice. There was a lot of resistance to it being categorized as a medical or mental health condition, but the sheer incidence of “shell shock” meant that, eventually it had to be dealt with.
WWII brought something of a better understanding – more effort was put into gathering statistics, and psychologists working for the armed forces put forward convincing arguments that, rather than indicative of a failing of character (which harkens back to the medieval understanding), “battle fatigue” would hit anyone who spent 200-240 days in active combat. But while terms like “battle fatigue” and “thousand-yard stare” entered the popular lexicon, the main solution was to improve rotation into and out of active combat
PTSD as a recognized mental illness that is understood to require psychiatric treatment didn’t really happen until after the Vietnam War.
What led you to choose the educational path that you did?
When I was in high school, History and English were my two favorite subjects, so I knew I wanted to major in one of those in college, and I didn’t want to do any more math ever.
So when I went to college, I took a bunch of courses in both. But while I liked the courses I took in English, I came to the realization that I don’t like most modern literary fiction, that my interest in poetry had been a passing phase, and that I wasn’t good at writing novels.Also, at the time, deconstructionism and postmodernism and post-structuralism were absolutely the rage and I couldn’t stand that stuff. Overall I had the sense that if I went into English as my major, I would be both very old-fashioned and very unhappy, and I didn’t want that. (Now, if I had known I could write about genre fiction or even comic books instead, my life might have gone in a very different direction, but that wasn’t really a thing at the time in the dept)
At the same time, I was taking courses in all different areas of history – ancient Greece and Rome, medieval and modern Japan, American history, early modern and modern European history, labor history, intellectual history, economic history, history of social movements and the left, etc. – and enjoyed pretty much everything I was taking. I also found that writing about history came naturally to me in a way that writing fiction didn’t, and that I loved the treasure-hunting nature of archival research. So that basically sold me on history.
It also helped that I was getting very into politics – in fact, I almost tried to go to law school because I rather naively thought that you needed a law degree to do politics, and thank the gods I was got sick as a dog when I sat my LSATs – and in my History Department there were a couple of people who belonged to the then-relatively-new subfield of the History of Public Policy. Once I started reading Public Policy History and comparing what I was reading to current politics, my entire worldview shifted and I knew I wanted to do this more than anything else. So I applied to History PhD programs according to how many people in those departments did Public Policy History, got into one, and now I teach public policy for my day job.
How do tax farmers work? I understand they are assigned a region and promise the king they will produce a certain amount of revenue with everything past that being theirs to keep. However I don’t understand the actual process. Do they bring troops with them to help shake down the people? Were the taxes just arbitrary? Was there a tax season? How did the smallfolk feel about this? Merchants? Nobles?
You’ve kind of missed a step in the process that goes a length to explaining why the system was so messed up. The promise in question was usually an up-front lump-sum payment given in exchange for the right to the ongoing revenue-stream in that province. Yes, sometimes the lump sum was seen as a loan that the state would pay back, but most of the time the state just took the lump-sum and moved on.
Now, this is an auction process – various people are bidding for the rights to tax and the government takes the highest bid. So not only does the winner needs to collect a sum equal to what they paid for the license (in order to break even), and then has to keep on taxing above that to turn a profit, but because there’s competition, their initial bids could quite possibly exceed the normal amount of revenue that a province could produce, let alone the added burden of the farmer’s profit margins.
This is somewhat useful for relatively weak states – they don’t have to pay a large bureaucracy of tax assessors, collectors, and accountants to keep track of the money. Lump-sum payments means that you have more cash on hand at certain periods of time then if you were waiting for money to come in from different regions at different times of the year – and that’s very useful when you’re starting a military campaign and need supplies and a paychest to keep the army going.
But, it often means higher tax rates than if the state was collecting it themselves, which increases discontent in the provinces potentially leading to revolts that you then have to put down with your army, and reduces the growth rate of the provincial economy because money is going to tax collectors (both as payments and as investment flows into buying up those contracts) rather than being invested in agriculture or manufacturing. And in the long run, it’s better to have a growing economy than a stagnant one.
So….to answer your actual question: how did it work?
Better than the first three? I don’t think so. There’s a reason why ASOS is everyone’s favorite book.
Better than it could have been? Yes. I think the five year gap would have been a grave error.
Is it a conspicuous non-reaction, or did he not give a shit about Vardis Egan?
Tyrion II of ASOS has Ser Barristan having said publicly that he has “no friend but his sword.”
We don’t know. My guess is that he pulled an Achilles, because he was pissed off about how Rhaegar had treated his sister.
As I described in the original essay, Aegon’s efforts added more fuel to the fire, as now there were men who had expected to lead the next expedition who were now out of a job come Daeron’s elevation.
I think Varys would have had him and Tywin killed the moment it came time to shift the Lannisters out of power.
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