It means that whoever owns the ship, and it could be the captain or it could be a merchant or a consortium of merchants or a nobleman (although that’s less likely), is based out of Oldtown.
In terms of taxes and fees, you’re dealing with two things. The first is that the owner/s pays taxes to House Hightower by virtue of being a resident of Oldtown, but that’s no different from any baker or blacksmith who also is a resident of Oldtown. The second is that when the ship is in Oldtown, it pays tariffs and excise taxes, harbor fees and warehousing fees, the same as any other ship in the port (although it’s quite likely that the Hightowers charge a lower rate to resident merchants as a way of stimulating local commerce).
Looking at the sources, it doesn’t seem like the Hightowers have a proprietary trading fleet in the same way that the Redwynes do – rather, the Hightowers’ navy is meant to “to protect his trade.” Nor does King’s Landing have a proprietary trading fleet; they have a lot of ships based out of that port, but the crown doesn’t own them directly, although Littlefinger probably bought quite a few of them using embezzled royal funds.
Building off of a discussion that I had with @goodqueenaly, I thought I’d share some thoughts I had about the expulsion of the Manderlys from the Reach. We don’t know much about what precipitated this event other than that Perceon III “feared their swelling power in the Reach.” Now, this could be pure feudal politics, with Perceon III wanting to take down an "over-mighty vassal.”
However, I think it’s notable that when the Manderlys fled, “the wealth that the Manderlys had brought with them from the Reach” was enough to build both the New Keep and the city of White Harbor. It takes an enormous amount of money to do that. This makes me think that the conflict was over money.
Now there are a couple ways this could happen. One possibility is that, as the Mander is named after the Manderlys, they probably had a dominant position on the river (probably somewhere near the mouth, given their conflict with the marcher lord Peakes) which allowed them to put a toll on river traffic – not only would this make the Manderlys reach indeed, but it would create a natural point of conflict with the Gardeners upstream at Highgarden.
Another possibility is that it was a John of Gaunt situation. The Manderlys were a very wealthy and thus envied house, Perceon III needed money for a war or something, and decided to confiscate the estate of the richest house in the kingdom, similar to how Richard II confiscated the estates of his uncle John of Gaunt to help pay for his failed war in Ireland.
A third possibility is that, similar to how Wyman Manderly wanted to become Robb Stark’s master of coin, the Manderlys were the masters of coin in the Reach. From that position, the same techniques that made Thomas Cromwell one of the richest men in England might explain how they had so much moveable wealth during their exile, in a society where most wealth is tied up in the land. And it might also explain how they were brought down, through allegations of corruption or embezzlement, true or false.
No one in King’s Landing likes or trusts Littlefinger: not Varys, not Pycelle, not Cersei, not Jaime, not Stannis, not Renly, not Tyrion, not Tywin, no one. He’s an incredibly obvious schemer who can’t stop monologuing in front of people he’s trying to scheme against or reminding people he’s betrayed that he’s betrayed them. He should try to hide it, but his compulsive need to prove he’s smarter than everyone else won’t let him.
Littlefinger gets away with it because A. most people don’t see him as a threat because he’s got no lands and no armies, B. he’s made himself indispensible as the only person who understands the royal finances, and C. he’s pretty good at hiding his actions.
Sure it is. Let’s leave out the fact that we see plenty of people using gold dragons – Dunk, for example. Let’s just do a thought experiment.
A load of bread costs around three coppers. Assume that everyone in King’s Landing eats a loaf a day – which is pretty close to the statistics we have of ancien regime France, for example – that’s 1.5 million coppers that bakers are getting, which works out to about five thousand pounds of metal, on a daily basis. Trying to store that much metal is a giant pain, but it gets a lot easier when you can turn that 1.5 million coppers into 26,785 stags or 127 gold. I guess the point I’m getting at is that when you’re thinking about currency, in addition to thinking about different economic classes, you also need to think about different economic scales – even if most people aren’t throwing around gold on a regular basis, there’s a lot of economic activity in aggregate and having different denominations makes that easier.
Now, as for why those denominations are metallic rather than paper…well, let me recommend Extra History’s series on the history of paper money:
The quick version of a very long and complicated history is that it depends on social and economic organization and levels of trust. With regards to the former, it comes down to this: how many people are there for whom this given note is going to be useful? Yes, merchants and nobles might be doing enough business that they’d be able to use a letter of credit from a given merchant, but what happens if that merchant or noble needs to buy a horse from a farmer who’s never been to King’s Landing, let along Braavos?
With regards to the latter, before governments get into the business of printing money, you’re basically taking it on trust that the particular bank’s or merchant’s or nobleman’s notes are worth what they claim to be, and you run the risk that a bank failure or a bankruptcy or fraud (because the potential for fraud with letters of credit and other notes is huge) leaves you with nothing.
And it gets even more complicated, because there’s no standardization, and so you have to discount the value of the notes of this merchant or this bank, which makes valuing the notes or making change or basic stuff like that really complicated. When I was in high school, my family sometimes went on trips to Old Sturbridge Village, a living recreation of an 1830s New England village. One of the places you could visit in the village was their bank, and I remember being shown these massive ledgers where bankers would record the different bank notes they have seen and what they think the notes were worth, and it’s a huge undertaking.
Whereas gold coins have the advantage that they can be weighed and assayed to figure out how much the coin is worth, so you don’t have to do any of that. And as MMT theorists have pointed out, there was another advantage to coins: they had the government’s stamp on them saying what the coin was supposed to be worth, and they had a relatively steady value based on what the government would pay for goods and services, and how many coins they would accept as payment for taxes.
That being said, the gold standard is insane, fiat money is a huge advance in human civilization, but it took a lot of work to make it possible.
Got it in one: they think Dany doesn’t speak Valyrian (which is partly why the Astapori think of her as a barbarian, because anyone who’s civilized speaks it), so Missandei is there to translate.
High Valyrian is pretty clearly modelled on previous international languages, but in slightly weird ways. On the one hand, because it’s the language of classical scholarship, it’s taught in the Citadel, and educated highborn people like Tyrion learn it as part of being cultured, it’s a lot like how Latin was the international language of the literate in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
And it’s also got that root-language thing; in the same way that Latin gave rise to the Romance languages, High Valyrian has given rise to the dialects of the Free Cities. Thus, Kraznys doesn’t speak particularly good Valyrian, “twisted and thickened by the characteristic growl of Ghis, and flavored here and there with words of slaver argot.” Grazdan is probably better-educated than Kraznys; hence being able to speak Westerosi (although not well), so his Valyrian is better.
On the other hand, trade languages aren’t usually the grammatically complex, sophisticated languages of scholarship. They tend to be simplified pidgins, because they’re being used in inter-cultural communication and you’re primarily interested in buying and selling and things like complex declensions and cases and tenses just get in the way of business. So for example, the original linga franca which emerged in the Mediterranean in the medieval period, used a simplified Italian as its base because of the prominence of Italian merchants, and then added on large numbers of loan words from almost every language group a merchant might encounter in the Mediterranean, from Spanish and French to Turkish.
Well, it’s tough to determine the exact frequency, because there was never a kingdom as large as the Seven Kingdoms are in the medieval era, but he should follow the mode of Aegon I, visiting the major cities to include the North, guesting in the castles of Lords Paramount, both receiving gifts from and bestowing lavish gifts upon his host, stirring up patronage of craftsmen. An active king stresses the royal presence.
Ideally, you’d also get rid of Littlefinger and have a Master of Coin who actually has the realm’s finances at heart too, but ideally, he should make a circuit of the kingdom (as long as it’s summer, of course) in his first ten years or so. @racefortheironthrone, would you have a better idea of how often he should do it? I’m at a loss when Westeros is as large as it is.
EIDT: To clarify, he wouldn’t make one circuit, it would more like, visit this place, then return, visit another place, then return. Key places to visit would be the Eyrie, Storm’s End, and Casterly Rock, with Riverrun being a nice and convenient stop.
Thanks for the question, Too High.
SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King
Well, let’s take Henry VIII as our jumping off point. Henry VIII went on royal progress every summer, from around August through October. The royal party would travel around 10 miles a day, and would stay in various residences in between for anywhere from a night to a fortnight. So let’s do some basic math: 92 days at around 10 miles a day makes for a maximum of 920 miles travelled, although obviously longer stays are going to knock off some good bit of those miles.
Now, how far does that get you in Westeros?
Storm’s End: 385 miles from King’s Landing.
Casterly Rock: 830 miles from King’s Landing.
Riverrun: 655 miles from King’s Landing.
Highgarden: 760 miles from King’s Landing.
So you could reasonably do a progress to most of the south on an annual basis, weather permitting. Trips to Winterfell (2,010 miles from King’s Landing) or Oldtown (1,305 miles) or Sunspear (2,055 miles from King’s Landing) are not within the normal scape, but as we see from AGOT are possible.
There’s a couple of possibilities. The first, and most likely, is that the Order of the Green Hand post-dated the Andal invasion, since the Gardeners from whose sigil it drew its name managed to thrive during that invasion. The second is that the Order was previously a group of “sworn swords” similar to Northern cavalry, and adopted the trappings of chivalry after the Andals.
As for the barrow knights, there are also a couple possibilities. The first is as you suggest. The second is that the term barrow knight is used similar to “hedge knight,” indicating an independent mounted warrior of the barrowlands who made their holdfasts in the artificial hills. Indeed, given the real-world use of the term to describe prospectors and archaelogists who dig in prehistorical barrows, it might be a derogatory term similar to “hedge knight,” indicating a warrior whose wealth and position comes from robbing the tombs of the dead. The third is that GRRM likes to play as the Vampire Counts from Warhammer Fantasy.
Basically, it comes down to questions of state capacity – could the monarch tax enough on a regular basis to keep a standing navy and a shipbuilding industry around in peace-time? Usually, the answer was no, because the taxing powers of the monarch tended to be too fixed by tradition, and the revenue service too undeveloped, to collect the necessary funds…in peace time. War, it was generally understood, was an exception to the normal rule, and the powers of the monarch were greatly expanded.
To use England as an example, the monarch was supposed to fund both their household/court and the government out of their personal incomes plus their “ordinary incomes” (namely, revenue from excise taxes on imported wines, plus incomes from various monopolies) which Parliament traditionally voted them for life. Anything more than that required a vote of Parliament to impose taxation…but during war, the King could impose “ship money” on ports, coastal towns, and coastal shires – in essence, a feudal requirement to provide ships for the navy or enough cash for the king to build or hire additional ships.
But ship money was only supposed to be imposed in times of war, and when Charles I tried to use it in times of peace to avoid having to call Parliament, it led to a huge legal controversy, a massive campaign of tax refusal, and helped to build up the Parliamentary coalition against Charles I which would lead to the English Civil War.
So with those kind of institutional structures, you’re not going to get a steady ship-building programme.
Dromonds were a Byzantine improvement on the Mediterranean galley. They had an above-water spur rather than an underwater ram, lateen (triangular) sails which are easier to use to tack into the wind, providing superior mobility in adverse winds, and had a full rather than partial deck, which provided additional protection for the rowers from missile fire.
As for Aurane, yes it is. For example, Warwick the Kingmaker was the Captain of Calais and Lord High Admiral of England, which gave him control over England’s largest standing military and its navy. Warwick repeatedly used the navy to conduct pirate raids against the Castillians and the Hanseatic League, which made him very popular with the London merchants he fenced the booty to (and who were competitors of the Castillian and Hanseatic merchants).
(A cool animatronic at Warwick Castle, which I visited when I was a youngun…)
And when fighting between York and Lancaster broke out, Warwick used the navy both defensively (allowing him and the Duke of York and his family to escape into exile) and offensively (his invasion of June 1460 which led to the Battle of Northampton where he captured Henry VI). The garrison stayed (mostly) loyal to him because Warwick was the richest man in England and offered them pirating loot to boot.
Moral of the story: make sure your admirals are loyal, because ships are a very mobile asset.
So GRRM has somewhat fused the office of cup-bearer with the office of page (although it’s complicated by the fact that he also uses the term page), which is creating the confusion.
From the ancient world through to early modern Europe, the office of cup-bearer was indeed an adult position of respect and influence. In order to prevent poisoning, monarchs appointed trusted men (or women, we have examples of female cupbearers in Beowulf as well as in the Bible) to serve them drinks and ensure they weren’t poisoned (sometimes doing double-duty as food/drink-tasters as well). Indeed, a sign of how important the position could be is that Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Akkadian Empire, began his career as cup-bearer to the king of Kish, and that the King of Bohemia was given the office of Arch-Cupbearer to the Holy Roman Emperor during coronation rituals. Or for a less exalted but no less important version, you have the gentleman below, Sir David Murray, cup-bearer to King James VI of Scotland and future Lord Scone and Viscount Stormont.
By contrast, the office of page was an age-gated one, which sons of the nobility would likely occupy from age 7-14 before they graduated to be squires and then knights. Pages did odd jobs for their knight or lord – carrying messages, cleaning stuff, helping to arm and dress their master, etc. and for the purposes of this post, fetching food and drink for their master especially at table. In return, pages would be given room, board, livery, and education in the fundamentals of horse-riding and associated sports, combat, basic literacy, music and other pastimes, and above all, manners.
As for the Mistress of the Robes, no she didn’t have to be unmarried: see Harriet Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, Mistress of the Robes to Queen Victoria, who held the post before and after her marriage. However, ladies-in-waiting don’t have to be unmarried either; there were in fact different titles used to describe married vs. unmarried ladies in waiting, so that in England an umarried lady-in-waiting would be called a “Maid of Honour”; in France it would be “dammes” vs. “damoiselles”; in Germany it would be ”staatsdame”
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