I think Stannis would have rewarded Robb by A. punishing the Lannisters (because they’re lawbreakers), B. returning Robb’s sisters, family sword, and father’s body (because it’s the right thing to do) and C. recognized him in his ancestral titles (because that’s the law).
I don’t know if he’d be inclined to do more than that, because as Stannis sees it, Robb owes Stannis his allegiance as a matter of law, and you don’t get brownie points for obeying the law. Now, as a matter of practical politics, a Stannis who needs Northern swords to carry him to the Iron Throne knows that you also need to reward service in proportion, so if Robb does a good job as he’s likely to do, I think Stannis would be willing to grant a request he saw as within reason.
No, Robb is not going to accept R’hllorism as a state religion in the North. But in this scenario, I don’t see Stannis feeling that indebted to Melisandre, so…
Because GRRM, in his tricksy wisdom, also made Renly intelligent, funny, and genuinely charming and then made his main opponents people who aren’t.
When we first encounter Renly in Sansa I and Eddard III, not only is he a young Robert without the alcoholism and Targ-murder-boner, but he’s also making fun of the Lannisters who we’re being primed to hate even more because they’re trying to execute dogs. (Although if you think about it, isn’t it interesting that Renly comes off so well despite not lifting a finger to actually help?)
Then when we encounter him again in ACOK, he’s being contrasted against Stannis, who we’re also primed to dislike (so that the face turn works in ASOS). Remember, Stannis is introduced allowing walking empathy magnet Maester Cressen to be humiliated, and the next image we have of him before he meets with Renly is him joining a scary cult (another example of how priming wrong-foots people: Melisandre). And again, look at their meeting:
Again, on the surface, Renly’s the one with the better japes, the peach, and he’s the one who’s going to get horribly murdered so there’s the sympathy factor as well.
Nope. Renly’s campaign pitch was: A. the glamour and magnificence of his person and his court, and B. the size of his battalions, while trying to get everyone to forget about the larger implications of any of it.
As usual, Stannis puts it best:
“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.”
Before he married her, Renly was scheming to get Robert to replace Cersei with Margaery.
Mace and Loras went along with this plan.
None of this actually benefits Renly or the Tyrells unless Cersei’s children could be disinherited as well.
The only way that Renly could promise that to Mace and Loras is if Renly knew about the adultery/incest, which would make Joffrey et al. bastards born of incest.
But, and this is key, the moment Robert dies without having divorced Cersei and disinherited her kids, Renly can’t admit any of this because it makes Stannis the indisputable rightful heir to the Iron Throne.
Well, as I said in my essay, Volantis is a particularly unstable slave society desperately trying to keep ahead of the ball, and that’s especially true with R’hllorism.
The problem with R’hllorism is A. it’s too popular to destroy (half their slave soldiers worship the Red God, so even a radical reactionary like Malaquo knows that he doesn’t have the internal resources to pull it off), B. it’s not their religion, so they can’t dominate the hierarchy and re-fashion practice or doctrine into pro-slavery messages, and C. it’s an institution that crosses too many boundaries of nation and caste to be cowed by the hegemony of the Old Blood of Volantis.
So consider their options? They say no to having the Temple built by the Black Walls – the High Priest has it built over in the Shadow City, and now it’s far less under their influence and a de-facto alternate government HQ. They say no to a religious militia – the High Priest tells the faithful that “all those who die fighting in [the] cause shall be reborn,” and now the Old Blood are fighting a religious civil war against the better part of five-sixths of their population, with an army whose loyalties they cannot trust.
Yes, Deepwood Motte gets you a stronghold with access to the sea, but you’re so far away from the rest of the action that you can’t really support any of the other Ironborn forces, so you make yourself somewhat of an irrelevance. And honestly, Bear Island, being an island, makes for a much better choice for a stronghold in that region.
IMHO, the reason Asha takes Deepwood Motte is to give Bran and Co. a reason why they can’t take shelter with the loyal Glovers and have to keep going straight north to the Wall.
How much trade does the iron throne do? Like what percentage of gdp would a typical medieval state have as imports and exports? What does this trade consist of? And how effected would westeros be if it were completely cut off from the rest of the world?
If you’re asking how much international trade Westeros does, I think it’s rather low given that A. the overwhelming majority of the population works in subsistence agriculture, B. as Westeros is rather underdeveloped, there are severe limits to the spread of markets due to the inability to get goods to market, and C. Westeros’ exports are almost entirely natural resources (food, wine, wool, timber, etc.) and its imports are higher valued-added manufacturing.
If you’re asking for a percent GDP figure, there are estimates that 16th century England had a foreign trade of less than 8% and that was after a huge surge in the wool trade and we haven’t seen in Westeros anything like the social and economic transformation that the rise of the commercial wool trade had on England from the 14th through 16th centuries. Likewise, I’ve seen estimates that the agrarian economy (i.e, just that part of the economy that came from producing crops) made up 85% or more of English GDP in 1300, which also suggests a low figure for Westeros.
So, when Aegon I started up, Harren Kingdom of the Isles and Rivers was clearly on the offensive:
“…but the most belligerent kings of Aegon’s time were the two whose realms lay closest to Dragonstone, Harren the Black and Argilac the Arrogant. From their great citadel Storm’s End, the Storm Kings of House Durrandon had once ruled the eastern half of Westeros from Cape Wrath to the Bay of Crabs, but their powers had been dwindling for centuries. The Kings of the Reach had nibbled at their domains from the west, the Dornishmen harassed them from the south, and Harren the Black and his ironmen had pushed them from the Trident and the lands north of the Blackwater Rush… North of the Blackwater, the riverlands were ruled by the bloody hand of Harren the Black of House Hoare, King of the Isles and the Rivers. Harren’s ironborn grandsire, Harwyn Hardhand, had taken the Trident from Argilac’s grandsire, Arrec, whose own forebears had thrown down the last of the river kings centuries earlier. Harren’s father had extended his domains east to Duskendale and Rosby. Harren himself had devoted most of his long reign, close on forty years, to building a gigantic castle beside the Gods Eye, but with Harrenhal at last nearing completion, the ironborn were soon free to seek fresh conquests. No king in Westeros was more feared than Black Harren, whose cruelty had become legendary all through the Seven Kingdoms.”
Hence why, when Aegon started, Argilac Durrandon and Sharra Arryn both approached Aegon about an anti-Harren alliance, with Argilac hoping to “establish the Targaryens along the Blackwater as a buffer between his own lands and those of Harren the Black,” and Sharra looking for “all the lands east of the Green Fork of the Trident for the Vale’s support against Black Harren.” Although if you want a good sense of how crab-bucket politics the Great Game could get, consider that Princess Meria of Dorne approached Aegon with a plan to gang up on the Stormlands…So you have two dynamics at once: a bunch of players wanting to pounce on the declining Stormlands to get what they can while they can, but also a number of players seeing the Ironborn as the new threat that needs to be jumped on with both feet lest they win the Great Game.
With no Aegon, I would imagine Harren would keep pushing south as the Durrandons ran out of steam…up until a crucial point, probably during a siege of Storm’s End. Then you’d see a couple things happen: first, the Vale would launch an invasion of the eastern Riverlands to “liberate their Andal brethren from the heathens.” Second, the Rock and the Reach will announce that “Harren the Black is a threat to all of Westeros,” and promptly invade the Riverlands from the west and the south…although maybe they’ll do something weird like launching a joint naval invasion of the Iron Islands at the same time. Third, Harren will be forced to pull back, and everything turns into a blood bath in the Riverlands.
And the Great Game would shift, likely with the Iron Islands reduced, the Riverlands divided (probably with the Westerlands grabbing Riverrun and the Trident, the Reach trying to grab everything from Stony Sept to Lord Harroway’s Town to Maidenpool and overreaching, and the Arryns fighting the Reachermen for Crackclaw Point and the Westermen for the Ruby Ford), and everything in chaos. The Durrandons might luck out with a rump state against fierce Dornish pressure – although who knows, maybe a Gardener decides to get their own back for Garth X by burning Sunspear or something, and that gives them enough breathing room to rebuild their fortunes. Oh and I’m sure that a Gardener will start talking about “saving the Stormlands from the Dornish” and the claims of Garth VII’s daughters.
So yeah, there’s plenty of ways to redraw the map to build multi-national states – the problem is the Great Game makes all of this unstable as hell, because it’s designed to prevent anyone from winning.
Ulmer, stooped and grey-bearded and loose of skin and limb, stepped to the mark and pulled an arrow from the quiver at his waist. In his youth he had been an outlaw, a member of the infamous Kingswood Brotherhood. He claimed he’d once put an arrow through the hand of the White Bull of the Kingsguard to steal a kiss from the lips of a Dornish princess. He had stolen her jewels too, and a chest of golden dragons, but it was the kiss he liked to boast of in his cups.
That is a trenchant critique, and I’m glad you asked it!
Even in that scenario, I would still maintain that it’s a better strategy than sending 4,000 men to get butchered uselessly at the Golden Tooth and theng, waiting at Riverrun until you get overrun.
For one thing, it gives you 4,000 more men to hold the Red Fork, which means extra men available to go out scouting for Tywin’s army so as not to be taken by surprise, extra men available to defend Pinkmaiden aaginst Tywin’s army (preventing him from rolling up the line), you still have the option to throwing in the reserves to push Tywin’s second army back, and you have at least a decent chance of getting the army back to Riverrun in good order. Certainly much better chance than in OTL.
For another, it’s still going to inflict more casualties on the enemy than OTL: Jaime’s army still needs to cross the Red Fork and Tywin’s army is stil going to have to assault a well-defended castle. And wearing down the Lannister forces also means slowing them down, preventing that lightning march across the south that knocks out so many castles (including Riverrun).
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 