Just a backup in advance of the detumblring
POLITICS OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS: THE RIVERLANDS (PART II)
Credit to J.E Fullerton/Ser Other-in-Law
When last we left off in the story of the political development of the Riverlands, the grip of the Stormlanders on their province was beginning to slip, and the Ironborn were rowing across Ironman’s Bay, looking to shake it loose for good…
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A cartel is a group of economic actors – either sellers or buyers – who agree to cooperate in an attempt to create an oligopoly that can fix supply and/or demand (and thus prices), market share, and so forth. A trading cabal would probably be focused on trying to control a geographic market, or on trying to corner a given commodity.
In terms of its origin, the use of “cartel” with regards to business dates back to the late 19th century, where it was used in Germany to describe business organization in the new industries (whereas in the Anglo-American sphere, the terms “trust” or “combination” predominated).
How different would things have been if House Justman hadn’t been wiped out by the Ironborn?
Very, very different. While still making a lot of the same mistakes w/r/t city charters as other regimes, the Justmans were probably the strongest of the Riverlands dynasties.
If they hadn’t died out, then:
Now what happens when the Targaryens come, I don’t know. But if the Justmans survive, they’re going to be much stronger and more stable than the Tullys, that’s for sure.
I loved those last reflexions about Royce and the prologue, it encouraged me to ask you something about the wall, I just hope it’s not too stupid. I think the wildlings are said to come now and then quite easily to the south of the wall, like Mance visiting Winterfell, do they always need to climb the wall, as Jon and Ygritte did? On the other hand, I just can imagine the direwolf mother sent by 3er, avoiding the wall by the coast… Did I miss something? thank you in advance!
The wildlings have a few options: either they climb over the Wall, take the Gorge by the Bridge of Skulls which follows the Milkwater to the Bay of Ice, or take their small leather boats across the Bay of Ice or the Bay of Seals.
On the Justman-Hoare conundrum: Is one possible solution simply Qhored the Cruel being a brief resurgence of Ironborn supremacy such that that after his death no Ironborn leader had the capabilities to arrest their decline as he had?
Regarding the ironborn timeline issues, I remember a couple people on Reddit put forward a theory a few months ago that the Andal Conquest happened over the course of around two thousand years (noting the 1-200 years between the (final) conquest of the Vale and the reign of Tristifer IV), and thus didn’t come to the Iron Islands until well over a thousand years after they came to the riverlands. Does this theory hold water for you?
Going to consolidate a couple questions from different people on the whole Ironborn timeline thing:
W/R/T the Mallisters, since Torgon Latecomer was one of the earliest of the Greyirons, since he was elected at a kingsmoot, and Torgon’s son Urragon came before Urron Redhand, who A. lived five thousand years before the War of Five Kings and B. whose line ruled for a thousand years before the Andals arrived in the Iron Islands, I don’t think Mallister’s conquest of the Cape happened during the reign of the Justmans but significantly before. (For one thing, if Qhored the Cruel was a Hoare, that conflicts with the Greyirons ruling for a thousand years.)
That Qhored solution wouldn’t work, because Qhored is listed as a driftwood king and the height of Ironborn power BEFORE the Greyirons abolished the kingsmoot and the Hoares replaced them and ruled as Iron Kings. I think the better fix is to say that either Aeron and WOIAF were wrong about Harrag and Qhored Hoare being driftwood kings – rather, if Harrag is a contemporary of Theon Stark, and Qhored of House Justman, they were in fact Hoare kings of the “black line” who came about after the Andal invasion (although that creates other problems relating to thematic arcs) – or that the bit about Qhored extinguishing the Justmans is simply not accurate.
As to the delayed timeline, that solves some problems but not others. Honestly, I think the Ironborn chapter needs to be rewritten from the ground-up with an eye to consistency and an eye to a much simpler succession of dynasties.
Ah yes, the factors. Factors are, indeed, agents who buy and sell goods on commission for a principal. Historically, factors were useful intermediaries who could do the buying and selling for a principal who couldn’t be at an important location, they warehoused people’s goods, they guaranteed credit, etc. The word factory actually originally meant a factor’s place of business, a trading post.
However, I think you’re getting too focused in on the idea of them being royal officers. Let’s take a look at the passage from Tyrion IV of ACOK as a whole:
“The Keepers of the Keys were his, all four. The
King’s Counter and the King’s Scales were men he named. The officers in charge
of all three mints. Harbormasters, tax farmers, custom sergeants, wool factors,
toll collectors, pursers, wine factors; nine of every ten belonged to
Littlefinger.”
These are all men who are loyal to Littlefinger, but not all of them are royal officials. The Keepers of the Keys, the King’s Counter and the King’s Scales, the harbormasters, and customs sergeants are government officials. But tax farmers are private citizens who buy the right to tax from the government; pursers are the officers on ships responsible for handling supplies and repairs, and factors are commercial intermediaries.
All of them rely on Littlefinger in different ways, as I discuss here. The royal officials and tax farmers bribed him to get their posts and now pay him kickbacks, but the wool factors are tied to him because Littlefinger “bought wool from the north…stored it, moved it, dyed it, sold it” and thus controls a good deal of the textile trade, and the wine merchants are tied to him because there’s a royal excise tax on wines. And the pursers are tied to him because Littlefinger has close ties to King’s Landing merchants who supply the merchant ships.
RFTIT Basement Tapes: Revolt From Below
A while back, my editor Marc Kleinhenz asked me to write a bonus essay in case some of the Hymn for Spring essays didn’t come in on time and we needed to bulk out the book. I decided to write an essay elaborating on some of my ideas about smallfolk agency in Westerosi history, and wrote about ¾ths of it when the late-breaking essays came in and we didn’t need it. And then I forgot I had written…
Well, they probably sailed east around Dorne and then up the Narrow Sea.
As to why not the Riverlands or the Vale…the Riverlands is famously fractious and prone to private wars over land, why would any houses stand by and let some king take their land and give it away to a Reacherman when the Reach had been invading the Riverlands since the fall of House Justman? And what Riverlander king would have the authority to make that stick?
Likewise, the Vale is pretty small and the lands had been divided up early on, which is one of the major reasons why the Andals had invaded the Riverlands with the encouragement of the Arryns – not enough space, need to get people to emigrate.
Whereas the Starks had vacant land, because the Wolf’s Den was not being properly held and had been repeatedly attacked by the Arryns and the Sistermen and slavers from the Stepstones. The Manderlys offered an opportunity to solve a major security problem without the Starks themselves having to pay for it.
Politics of the Seven Kingdoms: The Riverlands (Part I)
Credit to J.E Fullerton/Ser Other-in-Law Introduction In Part IV of the Politics of the Seven Kingdoms, we come to the best example of a failed state in Westeros – indeed, the only region of Westeros to ever lose the status of a Kingdom. The Riverlands are a perpetual runner-up in the game of thrones, more often a pawn or even the game board than a real player, despite its relatively large size,…
Well, the confusing thing is that, according to the WOIAF, there is both a royal justice system and the right of pit and gallows. So there’s a question about where the dividing line is between royal authority and the privileges of the nobility.
To quote an earlier post of mine:
“Well, let’s take Henry II’s judicial reforms as a jumping-off point: he’s perhaps best known for the Assizes of Clarendon (which in addition to asserting exclusive royal jurisdiction over criminal cases and royal jurisdiction over land disputes, also created some of the first grand juries) where he established the justices in eyre – six judges from Westminster who divided England between them and would travel in a circuit from county to county, covering their entire circuit every two years. He also established permanent judiciaries in the capitol which would eventually be known as the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King’s Bench. And this was pretty much how things went from about 1166 to 1285-1360, where the system of local justices of the peace began to replace the justices in eyre in terms of who does the majority of judicial work.
So if we were talking about providing a judiciary for Westeros, I think you’d probably start with a system of itinerant justices who could cover a good deal of territory between them, and you’d probably stagger the numbers by the size of the territory involved: Iron Islands are pretty small geographically so you could get away with one, Stormlands and Crownlands could probably be covered by two justices each, Westerlands and Vale maybe three or four each given the difficulty of mountain travel, the North and Dorne would probably need 5-6 given the long distances but also the lower population density, and the Reach would probably need 10 or more given the size and high population.”
So the first step is to set up itinerant royal justices so that you have a mechanism by which royal judicial authority is transmitted to the provinces outside of the direct overlordship of the King, and to establish in law that these courts have jurisdiction over certain crimes.
Note that Henry II targeted criminal cases – murder always gets people het up, and given the tendency of private wars between nobles to end in murder, it’s a good excuse to get the lords under warrant – and land disputes, because in a society where land disputes are going to be the majority of legal matters, that makes the royal courts very attractive.
The second step is to establish firmly in law what is already precedent: that the king and his ministers have appelate jurisdiction over judicial disputes between lords, with an eye to extending this into appelate jurisdiction over the judicial decisions of lords. This can also be important for royal authority down the line, because it allows you to overrule local lords and gets the ordinary subject to see the king as an interposing power they can appeal to.
The third step, as suggested by the second, is to maneuver yourself into a situation where A. the king gets a veto over local judicial decisions through appelate jurisdiction over all judicial decisions, and B. local lords are held legally accountable for violating the royal justice code in either action or decision. Perverting the course of justice, embracery, obstruction of justice, misprision of felony, mis- and malfeasance in public office, compounding a felony – there is a long list of old crimes from the Common Law that could be used as a cudgel against lords trying to maintain their tradional privileges.
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