Magisters are the wealthy and powerful of the Free Cities, which given the nature of the Free Cities’ economies overwhelmingly means merchants:
The true authority [of Lorath] resides with a council of magisters made up of nobles, priests, and merchants. Its isolation meant that the Lorathi were little involved in the events of the Century of Blood, save for those few who sold their swords to Braavos or Norvos.
[The Three Daughters] are mercantile cities, protected by high walls and hired sellswords, dominated by wealth rather than birth, cities where trade is considered a more honorable profession than arms. Lys and Myr are ruled by conclaves of magisters, chosen from amongst the wealthiest and noblest men of the city; Tyrosh is governed by an archon, selected from amongst the members of a similar conclave…
Her father, Lysandro Rogare, was the head of a wealthy banking family whose power waxed even greater following the alliance to the Targaryens. Lysandro assumed the style of First Magister for Life, and men spoke of him as Lysandro the Magnificent….Lysandro’s heir, Lysaro, spent vast sums in pursuit of power and fell afoul of the other magisters….
Three hides of land is a good bit – it’s a bit below a “knight’s fee” which was usually five or more hides, but a single hide enought to support one family, or 30 modern acres. So each of Gregor’s men gets 90 acres of land, which would put them solidly in the ranks of the yeoman – below the knight but above the knave, as it were.
The stableman gave him three gold pieces and the rest in silver. Dunk bit one of the gold coins and smiled. He had never tasted gold before, nor handled it…the heft of all that coin in his pouch made him feel queer; almost giddy on one hand, and anxious on the other. The old man had never trusted him with more than a coin or two at a time. He could live a year on this much money. (Hedge Knight)
So according to Dunk, 750 silver or three and a half gold (which he got for selling one horse, btw) is a good year’s income for a smallfolk like himself.
And since we see that a heavy meal of “lamb…as good as any he had ever eaten, and the duck was even better, cooked with cherries and lemons and not near as greasy as most. The innkeep brought buttered pease as well, and oaten bread still hot from her oven,” plus four tankards of ale works out to a handful of copper (when a loaf of bread costs three coppers normally) less than a silver, we can begin to get a sense of what kind of standard of living one could have one two silvers a day.
The reason why I took five gold as the high end is that the Hedge Knight happened a hundred years prior to the present of ASOIAF, and you would have gotten some inflation over that period.
But let’s take Jaime’s example: a fine warhorse works out to anywhere between a third and a fifth of a yearly income for a smallfolk – taking the average income in the U.S today, that horse is worth about $9,000-15,000 – which is pretty high, considering that the “American Association of Equine Practitioners estimates the minimum annual cost of owning a healthy horse — not including stabling costs — to be at least $2,500.”
Melisandre nodded solemnly, as if she had taken his words to heart, but this Weeper did not matter. None of his free folk mattered. They were a lost people, a doomed people, destined to vanish from the earth, as the children of the forest had vanished.
Do those thoughts seem disturbing given she is essentially saying regarding the wildlings that their lives don’t matter?
I think there’s two ways to interpret this passage.
The first way starts with the fact that Melisandre’s brand of religious devotion is intensely Millennialist and prophetic in nature – as far as she’s concerned, the Final Battle between Azor Ahai Reborn and the Great Other is at hand as the prophecies have foretold, and the entire world faces apocalypse unless it unites behind her god and his chosen champion. This is part of the reason why Melisandre is the most misunderstood character in ASOIAF – she doesn’t sacrifice people or burn weirwoods because she’s actively malicious, she genuinely thinks that what she is doing is necessary for the salvation of humanity, and like Varys she’s a hardcore consequentialist. A truly just woman is no less to be feared than her male counterpart.
In this reading, Melisandre views the wildlings as doomed by fate to be casualties in the coming war – these dead-ender wildlings who insist on staying north of the Wall have placed themselves right in the path of the Army of the Dead. And her view is helped by the fact that these wildlings have rejected both the true god and his champion, who are the only path to salvation.
The second way of reading has to do with her attitude of cultural superiority. Remember, Essosi consider Westerosi to be barbarians only recently raised to semi-civilization by the last remnants of the Valyrian Empire. Melisandre, as someone raised in one of the most ancient cities of Essos, probably shares this view, given that she is also a missionary bringing the true religion to the heathen.
Now think what someone like that would think of a people that even Westerosi consider barbarians and savages. One of the things I actually really like about ASOIAF is that GRRM shows his main POV characters reacting to the widllings or the mountain clans as people from their backgrounds would react: Tyrion considers the mountain clans’ devotion to democracy and gender equality to be signs of backwardness and part of his plan for using them to take the Vale is to educate them in civilized ways, like obedience to a king. Jon Snow comes to empathize with the wildlings’ desire for freedom and their attachment to their cultural heritage, but he also thinks that these same qualities will doom them on the battlefield.
In this reading, Melisandre is expressing the softer side of Manifest Destiny doctrine – as opposed to the harsher side, which presented native peoples as dangerous threats, this view said that native peoples were “destined to vanish from the earth” as the progress of Western Civilization eventually overtook them. Indeed, the very trope of the Noble Savage was premised on the idea that this fate was inevitable, but now interpreted as a tragedy that could be safely lamented. So in Melisandre’s eyes, the wildlings have rejected enlightenment in favor of clinging to superstion and will thus be swept away by the force of history.
So back in the day, I tried to figure this out by working out the ratio of cavalry to foot in the armies where we have good figures. Here’s what we know:
Taking Robb’s army at the Twins as our example, we see that 27% of the North’s army was cavalry (6 out of 22k) and 73% was infantry. (You can even go pre-Twins to cancel out the effect of the Freys, as 500 was 10% of the Stark cavalry, meaning that Robb had 5,000 cavalry and 13,000 infantry when he arrived at the Twins).
Combining Tywin and Jaime’s armies together, we see that the Lannisters had ~10,500 cavalry out of a total Lannister force of 35,000, which gives us a ratio of 30%.
Renly’s army at Bitterbridge was 80,000 strong and 20,000 of them were cavalry, which gives us a ratio of 25%. This is part of what started to make me suspicious about Renly’s numbers, because the Reach being the center of chivalry should have a higher percentage than the North, and even if we took 25% as our figure, should have more than 20,000 by itself, and then you have the Stormlands, which should have at least 6,000 cavalry by itself. This is why I’ve come to suspect that a lot of the Reacher lords and Stormlords did not answer the call (at least a third, depending on how much credence you put on Renly’s claim to have 10,000 at Highgarden) and that Renly was, characteristically, overstating his support when talking with Catelyn and Stannis.
So I would put the ratio of cavalry to infantry at ~27-30%. This would suggest that the numbers look like this:
The North: 9,450-10,500.
The Vale: 8,000-10,000.*
The Westerlands: 12,000-13,500.
The Crownlands: 4,000-4,500.
The Riverlands: 5,400-6,000.
The Reach: 27,000-30,000.
The Stormlands: 6,750-7,500.
Dorne:
6,750-7,500.
Ironborn: none.*
* – The Vale might be a special case, in that its army is described pretty much always as just “the knights of the Vale.” So it’s possible they have a higher ratio than normal, which would explain why all these noble houses are in debt. Likewise, the Ironborn have almost no cavalry due to the vagaries of geography, although things were different back when they ruled the Riverlands.
Now, granted, not all cavalry are knights. Northern heavy cavalry are essentially knights when it comes to social class, equipment, training, etc.
even if most of them aren’t given the title.
Squires aren’t knights, but they do fight as knights do on the battlefield, many if not most of them will become knights or are of the social class who become knights. But what about the people who don’t fit that mold?
If we look at Tywin’s army at the Green Fork, we can get a decent picture of how many are which:
The right wing was all cavalry, some four thousand men, heavy with the weight of their armor. More than three quarters of the knights were there, massed together like a great steel fist. Ser Addam Marbrand had the command…
This wing too was all cavalry, but where the right was a mailed fist of knights and heavy lancers, the vanguard was made up of the sweepings of the west: mounted archers in leather jerkins, a swarming mass of undisciplined freeriders and sellswords, fieldhands on plow horses armed with scythes and their fathers’ rusted swords, half-trained boys from the stews of Lannisport … and Tyrion and his mountain clansmen.
So Marbrand’s 4,000 men make up more than 75% of the Westerlander chivalry, which means that Tywin has around 5,333 knights out of 7,500 cavalry – making knights ~70% of his cavalry. If we extrapolate the same percentage across all of Westeros, we would see something like:
To integrate the wildlings into the North, they need land to settle on. Having them remain nomadic is not going to work – the rest of the North are settled agrarian people and they are not going to put up with wildlings migrating through their land taking whatever they want. It’s a recipe for cattle raids and bushwhacking and endless conflict.
The problem then becomes, what land do you give them? The Gift is the only “unclaimed” land in the North – giving them any other land means taking it away from the people already on it, and that’s not going to happen without a fight.
The hill clans make this point very very clearly when they show up in Jon XI of ADWD:
“Lord Snow,” said The Norrey, “where do you mean to put these wildlings o’ yours? Not on my lands, I hope.”
“Aye,” declared Old Flint. “You want them in the Gift, that’s your folly, but see they don’t wander off or I’ll send you back their heads. Winter is nigh, I want no more mouths to feed.”
Settling the wildlings in the Gift is the least bad solution, as Torghen Flint recognizes. It means the wildlings will be on their own land, and so won’t be making incursions into anyone else’s land. It reduces as far as possible the chances that violence will break out between the two groups.
After I did this post, @joannalannister asked if I could do a similar set of estimates for the other Great Houses, so I figured I might as well knock them out.
So what are the incomes of the .01% of Westeros?
House Lannister
Now, this is the one where I have to admit I may have under-estimated in the past. I had previouslyestimated that the Lannisters earn at least a million a year based on their lending to the Crown, but my population-based methodology put the Starks easily at or above that level, so I definitely need to do a rethink.
Given that the Westerlands have a population of around 4.5-5.5 million (depending on which estimate you use), the GDI of the Westerlands would be around 13.5-27.5 million dragons a year if we use the average peasant income. (Which would suggest a Lannister income from taxes alone of 1.3-2.75 million a year…)
However, we know from the text that the Westerlands have an unusually high GDI per-capita due to their vast mineral resources, high levels of urbanization, and high levels of human capital in their skilled artisans. So I would start at the upper range and add on perhaps another third to half, suggesting that their GDI is somewhere around 35-41 million dragons.
This would place House Lannister’s revenue at 3.5 to 4.1 million dragons a year, more than three times as much as House Stark – which would fit the Lannisters’ reputation for ostentatious luxury and the Starks’ reputation for spartan austerity.
House Arryn
I’m actually working on my essay on the politics of the Vale right now, but all evidence points to the Arryns being on the high side of average: we hear that “The Vale of Arryn—a long, wide, fertile valley entirely ringed by the great grey-green peaks of the mighty Mountains of the Moon—is as rich as it is beautiful,” and that “though the Vale itself is famously fertile, it is small compared to the domains of other kings (and even some great lords)…Trade is therefore of paramount importance to the rulers of the Vale.”
So I would put their per-capita income on the high-side of average, but this is offset by their lower population. Given a population of 3-3.5 million, the GDI of the Vale is probably around 15 to 17.5 million a year. This would bring in 1.5-1.75 million a year, but Gulltown’s port incomes probably brings it up to 2-odd million a year – substantially higher than the Starks despite having a roughly equivalent population, but significantly below that of the Lannisters due to their low population.
But as I’m sure the Arryns would be the first to tell you, money can’t buy good manners…
House Tully
House Tully is a fascinating case in how failed governance can waste the advantages of nature. Given that the Riverlands are “rich and fertile…the waters of the Trident make the lands ripe for settlement, farming, and conquest, whilst the river’s three branches stimulate trade and travel during peacetime,” the region’s 4 million inhabitants should produce a GDI of around 20 million dragons a year (taking the high average of peasant income), producing tax revenue of around 2 million dragons a year.
However, whether it’s due to underdevelopment or the weak grasp of the Tullys on their subjects, their actual army size compared to their potential army size suggests that they only have an income of 1 million dragons a year. Obviously in comparison to ordinary smallfolk, this is a staggering sum, but in comparison to their neighbors to the west and to the east, you can see why the Riverlands have struggled to maintain their independence.
House Greyjoy
These estimates are all rather crude, but this is especially true for the Ironborn, since so little of their income is generated by the Iron Islands themselves, and so much of their income is generated from reaving, which makes it very very “off the books.”
However, based on their poor soil and downright Dickensian levels of squalor, I would say that the Iron Islands population produces perhaps4.5 million dragons a year in GDI, which means the Greyjoys earn only 450,000 dragons a year in “legitimate income.” No wonder they turn to piracy to make up the difference.
House Tyrell
As has been said repeatedly, House Tyrell’s incomes likely fluctuate depending on the price of foodstuffs, given that the Reach is the breadbasket of Westeros. It’s also home to one of the oldest and largest cities in Westeros, and more towns and villages per capita than any other kingdom in Westeros, so you have to add that into the equation. As a result, it’s also the most populous region in all of Westeros.
Add all of these factors together, and you should adjust upwards from the initial projection of 60 million dragons a year in GDI. For consistency’s sake, let’s take the lower bound of the Lannister adjustment, and say that the Reach produces 78 million dragons a year in GDI.
This would suggest that the Tyrells have a yearly tax revenue of around 7.8 million dragons, almost twice what the Lannisters do. However, a few factors probably reduce that somewhat – first, the Tyrell revenues are probably less liquid than those of House Lannister, with much and more being held “in kind” as grain; second, the Tyrells don’t have additional income from Casterly Rock, which is no small factor.
All the same, no wonder they can afford a political strategy of bread and circuses for the people of King’s Landing…
House Baratheon
Given that the Stormlands are notoriously “thinly-peopled,” subject to poor weather for growing cereal grains, and rather under-urbanized compared to other regions, I would peg the Stormlands at the lower end of Westerosi per-capita incomes. This in turn suggests a GDI of around 7.5 million dragons a year, which is only a little bit above that of the North – which makes sense when you consider that the North has about 10,000 more men under arms despite the Stormlands having much better weather (relatively speaking).
This would put House Baratheon’s incomes at only 750,000 dragons a year, making them among the poorer Great Houses of Westeros. And that’s a hell of a step down from where they used to be, consider that the Stormlands once owned the Crownlands and the Riverlands, which would have made them richer by many times over.
How the mighty have fallen.
House Martell
House Martell is a difficult calculation indeed – Dorne is also thinly peopled, and much of its land is not arable. On the other hand, Dorne also has an unusual level of manufacturing and many high-valuable export commodities, which compensate for its desert climate.
Adding those two factors together, I’d put them around the middle for per-capita income, which suggests a GDI of around 10 million dragons a year – richer than the Stormlands largely due to trade and manufacturing, substanially poorer than the Vale despite roughly equal populations due to the Vale’s legendary fertilty, and way below the Reach or the Westerlands.
This is turn makes for an tax revenue of around 1 million a year, putting them roughly in the middle of the pack.
I doubt that the Manderlys are richer than the Starks, since the Starks get income from the entire North in addition to from the Manderlys, so they’re taxing 3.5-4 million people rather than a hundred thousand or so. And even though the per-capita income of the Manderly’s subjects is way higher than the rest of the North, it’s not enough to outweigh the Stark’s manpower advantage.
I did a rough estimate of Great House incomes here, but let’s try to do some calculations based on the ones I did for the Seven Kingdoms as a whole. The North has 3.5 to 4 million people, and assuming that 90% of them earn around 3-5 dragons a year, we’re talking 10.5-20 million gold a year as the rough GDI of the North.
Now, medieval taxation thankfully was generally simple (because medieval states lacked the bureaucracy to get fancy) so we’ll be using the English “tenth” (i.e, a 10% tax on moveable property and income) as our model. That would suggest that the North generates 1-2 million in tax revenue. Now, a good part of that goes to the King, but the Starks probably keep the bulk of it.
Now, the North is considerably less fertile and prosperous than the rest of Westeros, so we might want to start with the low range for peasant income and then adjust further. So if the North is half as prosperous as the average, then the North has a GDI of 5.25 million and produces 525,000 gold in tax revenue. If we say it’s two-thirds, then we’re talking a GDI of 7 million and 700,000 in tax revenue.
The Manderly’s income is a bit harder to figure out, because we don’t have a firm number on their total population – we know that White Harbor has 50,000 people living in it, but we also know that the Manderlys control a broad swathe of territory beyond just the city and have a higher per capita GDI than the rest of the North between their silver and their artisans. I would say that at a minimum, the population of White Harbor brings in 15,000 golden dragons to the Manderlys just on the regular tenth, not counting taxes and fees coming in from the port.
In many premodern cultures, guest right was considered sacred and breaking it was right up there with matricide or patricide in terms of crimes against the natural order set down by the gods. In Greco-Roman culture, for example, the right of xenia or hospitium was enforced by Zeus/Jupiter in his role as Zeus Xenios. Zeus would enforce this by disguising himself as a beggar (sometimes Hermes/Mercury would hang out with him, as he was the patron god of travelers) and then showing up to people’s houses, punishing people who turned him away and rewarding the generous.
Ovid formalized this tale in his Metamorphoses, where he tells the story of Baucis and Philemon, who take in Jupiter and Mercury and treat them generously while their rich neighbors bar their doors. In return for their generosity, Jupiter and Mercury spare them from a flood that wipes out the entire town for failing their duty of xenia.
Likewise, a lot of Greek tragedies have their roots in breaches of hospitality. The fall of the House of Atreus is littered with murdered guests and guests being unwittingly offered human flesh, the Acheans during the Trojan War have the support of Zeus because Paris abducted Helen while a guest under Menelaus’ roof, Penelope’s suitors in the Oddessy die because they have abused the right of hospitality.
And you see this in other cultures too – in Norse mythology, Odin/Woden frequently disguises himself as a traveller and shows up at the front door of King Geirodd to test him. Geirodd, being a sadistic bastard, has his guest chained between the two fires of his hearth to torture him and refuses him food or drink. Geirodd’s son takes pity on the traveler and gives him food and drink. Odin reveals himself, slays the wicked king, and elevates the son in his place.
(btw, Tolkein totally stole his look for Gandalf)
You can find very similar stories in Celtic myths, and in the Upanishads of Hinduism, where the maxim “Atithi Devo Bhava” means “the guest is god.”
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