If Tywin drops dead before the Purple Wedding, who gets the Rock?

If Tywin died suddenly before AGOT starts, who would inherit Casterly Rock? Jaimie is out, so would it go to Tyrion or Kevan?

ravenking1771 said:Hey there I saw the recent question about the Casterly Rock inheritance and I wanted to know how firmly did the medieval aristocracy adhere to inheritance I.e. Tyrion is Tywin eldest eligible make child and thus from a legal perspective his heir but Tywin does not consider him and if Tywin died before the events of the novel Tyrion would no doubt be challenged if not passed over by his family, so I wanted know how firmly did these governments respect inheritance rights?

Since I’ve gotten a couple questions about this, I figure I should probably consolidate them into one response rather than repeat myself. It depends on what Tywin set out in his will, and the balance of political power when it comes to both the claimants and whoever might enforce and/or recognize the validity of the will.

Certainly, Tyrion would have a very strong claim under Westerosi law; he is the oldest eligible male child of the deceased, and he had done nothing that would make him ineligible (like joining the Night’s Watch or the Citadel or the Faith).

However, whoever Tywin named in the will would also have a claim, and that claim would be buttressed by that person’s own lineage – if it’s Cersei, proximity would no doubt be stressed as well as the will; if it’s Kevan, then he’d be pointing to being the son of Tytos as well as Tywin’s brother as well as the wil. And so on.

But the balance of power is important: if Tywin dies pre-AGOT, Cersei is going to lobby for her own line (whether for herself or one of her children), and Robert might give in or he might give it to Tyrion out of spite, or he might want to give it to Kevan b/c Kevan fits his mental model of a strong Warden of the West (in the same way that he didn’t want a sickly boy to hold the Wardenship of the East). At the same time, Jon Arryn’s wishes would play a large role in that situation; he’s more of a traditionalist, so he might want it to go to Tyrion because Andal law says so and wills that go against the law lead to civil war and disorder.

If Tywin dies pre-Purple Wedding, it depends when exactly. If it’s after the Battle of Blackwater, Cersei is Regent and Tyrion has lost his handship, so he’s at a disadvantage. If it’s before the Battle of Blackwater, Tyrion has a significant advantage.

However, a lot would depend on how the Lannister lords at the Rock or at Harrenhal or at King’s Landing decide to jump: do they take their cues from Kevan as the oldest male Lannister on the spot, and does that mean he gets to play kingmaker or does he go for the Rock himself? Is their misogyny stronger than their ableism or vice versa? Do they fear that Tyrion’s heirs would inherit both the Rock and Winterfell, or that Cersei’s children would inherit both the Rock and the throne and/or Storm’s End?

How do you think the Lannister deal with the workforce for the mines at Casterly Rock? – Do they go in an out every day and live at Lannisport? – Are they quartered at the Rock? – Or are they quartered in barracks outside just outside the Rock?

That’s a great question!

There isn’t an answer in the text, but we do have some idea of how premodern miners lived.

As mining developed from seasonal labor done between planting and harvest to a specialized craft (especially as increased demand due to population growth and frequent warfare made mining increasingly lucrative), miners tended to live in their own settlements originally built immediately around mine shafts. As H.J Habakkuk puts it: “Whether the mining community formed part of a town or not, it was generally a sort of a state within a state, with laws and regulations of its own…”

This leads me to believe that the miners would probably live in or around the Rock. There’s another reason why this is the case. While miners did have certain legal privileges regarding taxation and their own courts, there were extremely harsh penalties for stealing ore (or more accurately, since lords and kings alike taxed a certain percentage of ore, evading taxes by concealing ore about their persons):

“…If he be attainted of carrying away ore a third time, his right hand shall be pierced by a knife through his palm and pinned to a windlass (1) up to the handle of said knife. There he shall remain until he be dead or shall have freed his hand from the aforesaid knife. And he shall forswear his franchise of the mine and if he have a meer (2) in the mine it shall be forfeit to the lord.“ (source)

If miners regularly commuted to and from Lannisport, with all of its many goldsmiths and merchants, you’d have a wide-open vector for stealing and then processng stolen gold for easy money for any miner looking to make some cash under the table. Given their reputation as tightfisted bastards, I would guess the Lannisters would prefer to have miners live on site or in a mining village where they could more easily “inspect” their workers (strip searches and cavity searches are not uncommon down to the present day in gold and diamond mining) and notice any signs of pilfering.

Knowing GRRM’s penchant for high romantic fantasy, I would guess the miners live a morlock-like existance deep within the bowels of Casterly Rock, far from sunlight and air, kept under strict discipline by the Masters set above them (literally) under the threat of the cisterns above them been loosed to flood their tunnels and make a second Rains of Castamere. But it’s not all bad. Living close enough to the forges and smelteries would no doubt allow one to laugh at the very idea of winter (or even doubt its very existance), and there’s always the possibility for the strong and clever to work their way up (literally) to better work at the port of the Rock where you’d get to see the sky and smell the salt air, or as a guard or soldier and get to see the world outside.

Cast-amere and Cast-erly

Well… pretty much there was a theory on reddit that posited the Reynes as a bastard branch of the Casterlys, an idea whose link was included in the wonderful post of @joannalannister in her words for House Reyne. That was pretty much why I said it.

Also, when I spoke, I meant how Ellyn Reyne does resemble Barbrey Ryswell. Ellyn Reyne wanted to become a Lannister with much more intensity than anyone else recorded, like Barbrey and Theon wanted to be Starks above all.

Ah, I see. It’s a fine theory as it goes, the whole reversed arms thing, but the WOIAF I think is pretty strong evidence to the contrary. I’d also point out that we don’t know what the heraldry of the Casterlys was, and that if the connection was through the Casterlys, why would they have reversed the sigil of the Lannisters?

I don’t know if I would agree that Ellyn wanted to become a Lannister, exactly. She “had for years anticipated one day being the Lady of Casterly Rock,” and certainly pursued Tywald and Tion and even Tytos.

But Ellyn doesn’t show any of the signs of alienation from her original family that, say, Theon did. As “the Lady of Casterly Rock in all but name,” Ellyn made damn sure that House Reyne profited from her success with Tion. Hence “her brothers Roger and Reynard were ever at her side, and offices, honors, and lands were showered upon them, and upon her uncles, cousins, and nephews and nieces as well.” Likewise, when she was finally exiled from Casterly Rock, Ellyn promoted the fortunes of Houses Tarbeck and Reyne as much as she could, shaking down Tytos for as much gold as she could get, putting it in to Tarbeck Hall and its surrounding lands.

So I think of Ellyn as more self-possessed than Theon and less bitter than Barbrey. Which I think means that she didn’t necessarily want to be a Lannister, but rather wanted to be the Lady of Casterly Rock and the mother of the next Lord…regardless of whether this was as a Lannister or as a Reyne or as a Tarbeck.

I was refered to you by Goodqueenaly. “How exactly would Stannis go about repaying the Iron Throne’s debt to the Iron Bank, assuming he wins? Would he “nationalize” the Lannister’s assets as punishment for more or less making Westeros into hell on earth?”

Hi. You’re pretty much on the nose. As Stannis sees it, Cersei cuckolded and then murdered the King, which is treason twice over, Jaime is a kingslayer and a breaker of the King’s Peace, Tywin broke the King’s Peace and then attacked the King’s banner, and the rest of the family aided and abetted.

So the first thing that happens without a doubt is that the Crown’s debt to House Lannister is cancelled – not defaulted on, but as another form of seizure of assets. That takes care of half of the Crown’s total debt.

Next, Casterly Rock and its lands and incomes reverts to the Crown. It’s unlikely that Stannis holds it permanently – the Westerosi custom that one person should not have two great seats would probably sway him, as would the difficulty of governing two seats 800 or so miles away. Rather, I’m guessing Stannis would fine the Rock to clear the Crown’s debts to the Church and the Tyrells and the Bank, and then give the Rock to some loyal house.

But the Rock could easily withstand that kind of penalty. Short of complete confiscation, Casterly Rock is going to be a power in the land, no matter who holds it.

Don’t know if you’ve touched on this one before, but why do you think that the Kings of the Rock never adopted more advanced financial instruments? Tywin seems to pretty easily serve as a continental financier for the Iron Throne using his extensive gold reserves. But you don’t really see any state bank or IB-like reserve banking that would allow the Lannisters to create more functional wealth through lending and develop more extensive bureaucracy. They seem to just leave their gold in a vault.

Here’s why: because the Lannisters are noblemen and not merchants.

A couple quotes on this point:

“A coin is as dangerous as a sword in the wrong hands.“

His uncle Kevan looked at him oddly. “Not to us, surely. The gold of Casterly Rock …”

“… is dug from the ground. Littlefinger’s gold is made from thin air, with a snap of his fingers.”

Lord Tywin had always held the Free Cities in contempt. They fight with coins instead of swords, he used to say. Gold has its uses, but wars are won with iron.

Tywin Lannister was a very intelligent, well-educated man of his class, but that class was of a warrior aristocracy. He wouldn’t have been educated in more accounting than was needed to understand what his steward and his maester were reporting to him, because book-keeping is for women and servants. And that stuff is basic household accounts, not business accounting. And no Lannister would ever, ever learn finance, because that’s for merchants, and merchants are a lesser class of people who are concerned about gold rather than glory, who care more for probity than for honor. Look at how the Spicers are looked down on for coming from people “in trade.”

But I don’t want you to get the idea that Tywin was ignorant. It’s more about how he thought about money. Take a look at the essay I wrote about Tywin’s economic policy – Tywin’s father was looked down on because he loaned money to “common merchants,” even though that makes a ton of economic sense for the economy of the Westerlands, because it’s acting like a merchant. Tywin is a pretty classical mercantilist in a lot of ways – he wants to keep as much gold on hand as he can, because he thinks physical possession of gold makes you more powerful, he’s much more worried about getting his principal back than the income he might be forgoing in interest payments. And most of all, Tywin uses the gold of Casterly Rock for political purposes, not for economic purposes – he acts as Aerys II’s bank in order to make himself indispensable as Hand, he does the same thing for Robert in order to keep extending Lannister influence at court, etc. As the quote above points out, for Tywin, gold is a means, not an end in itself.

Tyrion, in part because he’s unusually well-read and perceptive, comes the closest to breaking out of this mentality, especially when he becomes Master of Coin and starts taking a really close look at the royal accounts. And even he, one of the smartest men in Westeros, can’t quite grasp what Littlefinger’s been up to.

And as I discuss in my “Who Stole Westeros?” essay here, Littlefinger is counting on this hole in the education of the Westerosi nobility to make his schemes work. Jon Arryn and men of his class don’t know about finance, so they wouldn’t think twice about what he was telling him about increasing revenues tenfold, and even if they investigated him, they wouldn’t understand what to look for.

Is Cersei’s “Golden Bank of Lannisport” notion really a good idea? From the text is always assumed it was another silly, unattainable pipe dream like her thought about building a new castle across the river???

It’s an incredibly good idea. Casterly Rock has an enormous, enormous amount of gold that’s sitting in the vaults not doing anything or at most being used for the Lannister war machine and nonproductive political loans. If you turn it into the liquid reserves of a bank, through the magic of fractional reserve banking, you can create many, many times more money than is in the Rock while still retaining a fairly conservative reserve rate (i.e, what percent of your reserves aren’t lent out so that they’re on hand to pay depositors who want to access their money).

The Lannisters lent 3 million gold to Robert Baratheon without blinking, paid off Jaehaerys II’s war debts without breaking a sweat. Their yearly income is at least a million a year, given how much they gave to Robert on a yearly basis. Forbes thinks that they have around 2.1 million gold in the Rock; I’ve seen estimates of up to 200 million gold. As a max figure, based on 6,000 years of earning a million a year (not considering any interest), they may have around 6 billion gold dragons in the vaults of the Rock.

So let’s take an average of these estimates and say they have 2 billion gold saved up. To begin with, that 2 billion equates to 380% of Westeros’ GDP. If they lent it out at a relatively conservative 10% reserve rate, they’d generate 20 billion in deposits and 17 billion in loans. In other words, just by putting the money into circulation instead of sticking it under a big rock, the Westerosi economy would grow by almost 4,000%.