Tag: asoiaf meta

So you don’t consider the Shavepate as a possible suspect in the Locust Poisoning? The Meerenese Blot convinced me, and its been approved by GRRM as “getting” the Meerenese plot.

This may be a case where I just got it wrong, but to me it never made sense. 

If Dany dies and Hizdahr is king, the Shavepate is a dead man and his entire revolution is destroyed. If his objective was to do a false flag operation, why not do it in a way that implicates Hizdahr – say, by having some of his Brazen Beasts attack Dany in the name of the Sons of the Harpy and Hizdahr King? Why not do it BEFORE Hizdahr marries her and gets political legitimacy? Hell, if he wanted to get rid of Hizdahr, why not have Hizdahr assassinated and blame that on the Sons of the Harpy? That would solve his political problem much more directly.

Look at the chain of events that happened in OTL – you have a poison intended for Dany, that only gets revealed because she brings Belwas with her and Belwas goes hog-wild on them before she even touches them, then the dragon shows up and Dany leaves, then Hizdahr replaces Dany’s entire team including the Shavepate, then the Shavepate has to sell Ser Barristan on a coup. Ridiculously circuitous doesn’t begin to describe it. 

So it’ll take some explaining in TWOW if that’s what happened. 

Long ask sorry! I know you’re kinda covering the special cases of naval warfare with Constantinople and Blackwater, but I was just wondering how these battles normally occurred. It’s obviously before pre-gunpowder so was it mostly based on ramming like with classical triremes? Was the intended effect more immobilization or sinking? Additionally, what was the composition of navies? I know the Chola and Song dynasties had large standing navies, but what about Europe? Was it more merchant marines?

You’re more or less on-point – at least in the Mediterranean, where galleys were dominant and combat was pretty similar to classical Greece and Rome, focused on either ramming or boarding or disabling your opponent’s sails and/or oars. 

However, in the North Sea, the Channel, the Baltic, and the Atlantic, sailing ships predominated over galleys because of the rougher waters – yes, the Viking longship had both oars and sails, but they didn’t really use galley tactics due to their smaller size and number of oarsmen. Hence, boarding was the whole game.

One thing that did distinguish medieval from classical naval warfare is that you essentially had the importation of the castle onto the sea. Hence, you get ships like these: 

image

The forecastle and aftcastle got their names for very straightforward reasons – they were basically big wooden castles on either end of the ship that let you shoot your enemy from above and made it more difficult for boarders to come to grips with you. That, plus the fact that in order to support these castles you had to build bigger and taller ships which could just ride down the very low-lying longships, made these ships dominant in combat (although less seaworthy). 

In terms of composition, it varied. To take the English as an example, there was both a royal navy, but also localities like the Cinque Ports and Portsmouth were also required to maintain ships, and mercenary fleets were hired, and merchant marines were impressed, at various times. Likewise, at  times the royal fleet consisted of only two ships (in the reign of Richard II) and at other times as many as 700 ships (in the reign of Edward III). The thing to keep in mind is that wooden ships don’t have a very long lifespan, so unless you’re consistently putting money into maintenance, repair, and replacement, you can build an entire navy only to have it vanish, requiring a new navy to be built – which is one of the reasons the numbers and composition varied so much. 

Your answer on Tax Farming was really interesting. Was the process usually for Tax Collectors under that system to press on until they caused too much trouble and were removed by the King, or was it a long-term business? It at least seems like that once the King has your lump sum payment, suddenly you’re not as useful anymore – and the sooner you’re replaced by someone who can pay the lump sum all over again, the better.

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…

Anon Asks: Tax Farmers

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? 

  • Tax farmers both employed their own leg-breakers debt collectors and had the right to call in royal troops. This is one of the things that made the practice less useful for governments than was originally thought – you’re supposed to be saving money on tax-collecting bureaucracy, but now you are detaching soldiers to protect tax collectors. And that means that your soldiers, rather than protecting your provincials from bandits and raids from enemy kingdoms, are shaking them down for money. That’s not good for loyalty to the regime. 
  • In terms of the rates, it depends on the place and time. In the Roman Empire, tax rates tended to be set at whatever rate the auction price plus profit hit, but it’s also true that taxes were basically assessed collectively for certain cities and regions and local elites figured out the process of how to gather the money, usually by paying the tax collector out of their own pockets and then repaying themselves by taxing the lower orders. In medieval England, however, feudal grants given in “fee-farm” clashed with the fact that rents tended to be fixed sums established by written contracts or by custom.
  • Tax season in premodern eras tended to be centered around the agricultural season, because after the harvest is when 90%+ of the population had something worth taxing and had it all in one place where you can easily count it and grab your cut. 
  • In terms of how people felt about it – well, peasants tended to hate it, because they were the ones paying most of the taxes, and while they generally accepted the legitimacy of the King or Emperor, that got really fuzzy when some pushy businessman is waving some piece of paper at you that says he has the right to seize your property. Likewise, because the agricultural cycle doesn’t necessarily synch up with the auction process back at the capitol, a bad season could mean that you’re paying the old rates or higher with much lower incomes. Merchants tended to be of two minds – to begin with, they’re usually the folks engaged in tax farming, so those guys are very pro-tax farming. However, when it comes to contracts to collect tolls or excise taxes, merchants were the ones paying those taxes and weren’t happy about it. Unless the nobles were the ones letting out the contracts, nobles tended not to like it – tax collectors are upjumped commoners coming onto your estates and pushing around your people, and that’s your job. And when the pushy tax collectors caused a riot or whatever, you were the one they would call in to provide protection. And if the whole thing started a rebellion, you would get the blame from the central government. 

If more realms than just the Reach and the Westerlands had fought at the Field of Fire do you think it might have gone differently, that they might have been successful in stopping the Targaryen invasion?

Hell no. That just ups the body count. If you’re trying to defeat Aegon’s Conquest you don’t do it with large-scale field battles, because that’s just a target for dragonfire. 

You do it with Dornish tactics. Split up your armies, abandon most of your castles (Casterly Rock being a noted exception) hide in wildernesses and inside populations, ambush his armies and then vanish rather than try to hold territory, stretch his forces out and then strike where the dragons are not. Wear him down and pick off Targaryens where you can. 

I just can’t get behind the Blackfyre Rebellion as a mere reaction to the Dornish Treaty and not the last gasp of the corrosion of Aegon. Why not a outcry and rebellion when Daeron dies, when Baelor agrees, when Aegon whores high maidens? Like the rise of rising for the Love of Daenaerys, years to late to be real.

What makes the reaction mere, exactly? 

When Daeron died: “News soon reached King’s Landing of King Daeron’s death and the rout of his remaining forces. The outrage that followed was swiftly directed at the Dornish hostages. At the command of the King’s Hand, Prince Viserys, they were thrown into the dungeons to await hanging. The Hand’s eldest son, Prince Aegon, even delivered the Dornish girl he had made his paramour to his father to await execution.”

Baelor: “Even as his lords and council cried for vengeance, Baelor publicly forgave his brother’s killers and declared that he meant to “bind up the wounds” of his brother’s war and make peace with Dorne.”

Aegon: “Aegon turned his attention to Dorne, using the hatred for the Dornishmen that still burned in the marches, the stormlands, and the Reach to suborn some of Daeron’s allies and use them against his most powerful supporters.”

Aegon IV didn’t manufacture this feeling out of whole cloth – in living memory, 50,000 Westerosi had died in Dorne, along with them a king murdered under a peace banner. That doesn’t happen without generating strong emotions, just as the events of Robert’s Rebellion created a drive for Northern independence or a Dornish desire for revenge against the usurpers or the events of the Greyjoy Rebellion the invasion of the North. 

And those events also took time – 17 years passed between Rickard Stark’s burning and Robb Stark being acclaimed King in the North, 10 years between the Greyjoy Rebellion and the invasion of the North, 17 years between the death of Elia and the likely invasion of King’s Landing by the Dornish. 

oneminutetomidknight notes:

“Anonymous asked: Stefan Sasse: By the way, Joffrey ordered Mandon Moore. Cersei is railing so much against incompetent underlings in AFFC that she surely would have spared a thought for Mandon Moore, the stupid-ass fuck who didn’t save her from the volonqar.

I am leaning in that direction now.“ 

I know the show isn’t always a great barometer but Season 3 near enough states that it was Joffrey who ordered it, which is more evidence that it is canon in the books too

Good point. 

Simon Rumble Asks: Daeron in Dorne

1. How did Daeron recruit a force that size? I understand from your Blacks ad Red series that the lords were promised political favor and new land. What did the common men stand to gain besides honor, gold and a glorious death?

2. How large was the host personally under Daeron’s command? Was it a mix of stormlanders/reachermen/crownlanders or was the source a single province?

3. Can you elaborate on the logistics of the Dornish campaign? How do you forage in Dorne considering the state of agricultural output and water scarcity? How do you resupply horses and pack animals?

 

4. How do knights campaign in Dorne? Wouldn’t the weight of their armor and the intense heat force them to abandon their arms? How did this influence their tactics?

5. Was the Conquest of Dorne inspired by the crusades?

1. Well, it’s a feudal army. Daeron calls upon his Lords Paramount, they bring their own household troops and call upon their vassals, who bring their own household troops and call upon their knights, who are bound by feudal oath to not only fight themselves but bring some infantry as well. Some of the common soldiers are there partly out of legal obligation – it’s probably part of the contract that gives them the right to their land – but most of them are professional soldiers who earn their living by fighting. 

2. It doesn’t say precisely how many men Daeron commanded, but given that he “divided his host into three forces,” I’d say about a third of the overall army and somewhere between 20,000 and 90,000 men. Given that Lord Tyrell was likely in command of most of the Reachermen, and Lord Oakenfist was likely in command of most of the Crownlanders, and the fact that Daeron attacked via the Boneway, I’d say his army was probably mostly made up of Stormlanders. 

3. The main logistical innovation that allowed Daeron to succeed was almost certainly Oakenfist’s naval superiority, which would have allowed both Daeron and Lyonel Tyrell to resupply by making a forced march to the headwaters of the Greenblood (and in Daeron’s case, probably via the coast as well). 

4. Look to the history of the Crusades, where knights fought in full armor throughout, and indeed many of the Crusader victories were due to their heavy armor, leading the Turks to dub them “men of iron.” It’s not ideal, but you can adapt – chiefly, by wearing robes of light cloth over your armor so it doesn’t heat up. But the heavily-armored knights were actually quite successful against their lighter opponents – as long as they didn’t let themselves get drawn out and surrounded, the weight of the heavy cavalry was actually an asset because it added momentum and shock to the charge, literally bowling over the enemy.

5. Yeah, there’s elements of the Crusades – especially the parallel between Oakenfist’s seizure of the Greenblood and Richard of England’s use of ships along the Mediterannean coast to resupply his army as it marched south from Antioch to Arsuf. But there’s also elements of Alexander’s conquests – the goat track, the extreme young age of the commander. And there’s elements of Caesar’s Gallic Wars – Daeron’s book and the three kinds of Dornishmen come from Caesar’s commentaries on his conquest, which begin with the line “gallia omnis divisa est in tres partes.” (All Gaul is divided into three parts)