How does voting work in Braavos? Who can vote?

This is a tricky one, so bear with me: the answer is, we’re not entirely sure.

We know that the Sealords of Braavos are elected (for life) and we know a little about who elects them:

Neither prince nor king commands in Braavos, where the rule belongs to the Sealord, chosen by the city’s magisters and keyholders from amongst the citizenry by a process as convoluted as it is arcane. From his vast waterside palace, the Sealord commands a fleet of warships second to none and a mercantile fleet whose purple hulls and purple sails have become a common sight throughout the known world.

Part of what makes this complicated is that the electorate is composed both of magisters and keyholders, and it’s not clear whether all keyholders are magisters but not all magisters are keyholders or whether the two classes are completely separate. We do know that both magisters and keyholders form quasi-nobilities, with the Antaryons and Prestayns as two well-known houses of the former (the current sealord is an Antaryon, for example), and the Reyaans as one well-known family of the latter. Another complication is that the keyholders are officials of the Iron Bank of Braavos, which suggests something of the interconnection of state and corporation as was the case with the Dutch Republic and the Dutch East India Company.

There’s also a suggestion, and this is more speculative, that there’s also a legislative body in addition to the Sealord’s executive. The books refer to a Hall of Truth (and sometimes a Palace of Truth, although it’s possible they could be two separate buildings) which is distinct from the Sealord’s Palace, where keyholders are “summoned to the Hall of Truth to vote.” While this could just be where the elections for the Sealord are held, the phrasing suggests otherwise (given that the choosing of the Sealord is a much more drawn out process than a sudden summons would suggest). Also, given how much Braavos loves its liberty, it would be surprising if they were less democratic than Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh.

Can you explain something to someone who’s very ignorant of US internal politics- how did the Republican Party go from being the champion of emancipation & anti-Secession in the mid 19th century to being viewed as a party of conservative whites opposed to POC ,in the current times?

Sure. It’s a very complicated story that could easily fill up a semester, but I’ll do the super-quick version: the Republican Party abandoned Reconstruction in 1876 following gradual voter fatigue over Federal intervention in the South and then gradually shifted to merely pro-forma support of civil rights in the 1880s, and then gave even that up in the 1890s.

The next big moment is when black voters in the North in the 1930s and 1940s – who had become a significant voting bloc due to the First Great Migration – joined the New Deal coalition (a shaky but potent coalition that included southern whites, western farmers, “white ethnic” working class voters in the Midwest and Northeast, the labor movement, middle class liberals and former Progressives, etc.) following the 1936 election, when the Republican Party embraced austerity and opposed the New Deal, which many African-Americans relied upon for survival.

This then gradually (I’m talking 1940s to 1960s gradually) forced the Democratic Party to embrace the cause of civil rights. In turn, southern whites began breaking with the Democratic Party – first, in creating a legislative alliance with conservative Republicans after 1937 to block further New Deal legislation, second, with the 1948 walkout from the Democratic Convention that led to Strom Thurmond running for President as the “States’ Rights Democratic Party,” third, the gradual erosion of the (white) “solid South” in the 1952, 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections.

This formed the basis for the “Southern Strategy” pursued by Richard Nixon: he saw that the white South was up for grabs due to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and believed that he could win their votes without appearing to openly favor segregation by campaigning on “law and order” and “states’ rights” without explicitly mentioning race.

And the rest was history.

What is the closest real world, approximate time period analogue for the Sothoryoss continent and its various creepy features?

Studied history as my main, switched career, and it as a strong interest. I actually have a question on the act of retelling of history. Just how grounded is the retelling of history caught in current events in your opinion? Obviously there is bias present in the author, but it seems to me that the retelling becomes a point to highlight events and people to lend weight to a cultural/societal ideal/though while ignoring the rest. Continued ==>

It is unavoidable that current events and societal preoccupations would color what topics historians are interested and how they approach those topics. Pace to those historians who believed in the Noble Dream of Objectivity, but historians aren’t robots and there’s no way to eliminate it from our scholarship. The only thing we can do is be honest and self-aware about it: as David Blight says, we all have biases and don’t trust anyone who says they don’t.

To take a classic example, the Dunning school of American history was fatally flawed by the fact that the men who made it up were almost entirely white Southerners whose fathers had fought for the Confederacy and who were themselves violently hostile to Reconstruction and the idea of black civil rights, and trying to create a “usable history” for the dominant politics of white reconciliation in the 1890s-1910s.

At the same time, the Dunning school would never have been overturned if it hadn’t been for the discipline reacting first to WWII and the ideological threat of Nazism (which led a lot of scholars to rethink the “needless war” thesis and the idea of fighting a war for the ideal of human equality, however flawed in practice), and then the rise of the civil rights movement and especially its popularity among Northern college students in the 1960s inspiring a whole bunch of historians to re-examine the Civil War and Reconstruction from the ground-up and completely undermine the Dunning school.

Wait… Did I just lose the other half of that history post?

I think you might have, anon. If only there was some way for me to message you directly….

How does an imperial crown differ from a regular crown?

Glad you asked!

An imperial crown is closed, comme ca:

The loops of metal over the top, the globe on top, all of these things signify an imperial crown. The symbolic meaning is that the wearer recognized no authority beyond them (save God) – more on this in a second.

By contrast, a merely royal crown is an open circlet or diadem, comme ca:

Not to say that royal crowns – like this one, the famed Iron Crown of Lombardy used by Charlesmagne and Napoleon – couldn’t be fancy or important, but they didn’t have the symbolism of imperial rule.

Why is this symbolism relevant? Well, when England split from the Catholic Church under Henry VIII, part of the legal justification that Thomas Cromwell put together for the Act in Restraint of Appeals was that:

“Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king, having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same.”

Now, keep in mind that some of these “divers sundry old authentic histories” counted Brutus of Troy and King Arthur as examples of British imperial dignity, but Cromwell could point to Henry IV and Henry V, who both were crowned with an imperial crown (probably as an attempt to shore up their authority given the whole business with Richard II), as proof that England had previously claimed independence from the Pope in Rome.

Anon Asks:

What is the difference between a kingdom and an empire?

Good question!

An empire was historically supposed to be made up of multiple kingdoms (hence why so many emperors also had some title akin to “King of Kings”) and nations (in the sense of peoples), ruled over by a single all-powerful figure (to distinguish an empire from a federation).

A kingdom, by contrast, was seen as made up of one nation (hence why you would have titles like “King of the Franks” or “King of the Belgians”) that supposedly shared a common language, origin, ethnicity, etc. Now, obviously this was usually more of a shared fiction than strictly objective fact, but that was the idea.

So to take a historical example: Charlesmagne was King of the Franks, King of the Lombards, and was then crowned Emperor of the Romans, although arguably by holding the Kingdom of the Franks and the Kingdom of Lombardy he already ruled an empire before he was crowned.

Hey Steve! How does a merchant like Spicer get to take the name Spicer? If he gets rich enough, does he just get to take a last name for himself? Or does he have to go to Lord Tytos and pay some money and get approval? How did Maggy the Frog’s son get to found a House? How does it work?

Good question!

Well, if we’re going by medieval England as we usually are, you can pick a last name whenever there’s enough people in a given area that it’s tricky to keep track of who’s related to who, because last names weren’t a signifier of status as much as titles or coats of arms or mottos (which required approval from above and usually some payment). So Ralph the spicer becomes Ralph Spicer and becomes considered a particularly well-established member of the merchant classes who’s following the forms.

The big change is what happens when Ralph Spicer wants to make the transition from merchant to the nobility and found House Spicer. This was a difficult and slippery process, because one would have to start by becoming a gentleman (which generally required that one owned a manor that could support you without your own labor), then ascend to the status of esquire (which definitely required approval from above in the form of achieving some form of office that brought the title of esquire with it, usually Justice of the Peace or Sherriff or something else having to do with the law), then become a knight (which requires being knighted), and generally only after could one aspire to the nobility. Along the way, there were not merely legal forms one had to pass through but cultural forms as well – gentlemen were supposed to learn to be “genteel,” to get into chivalry and noble sports and out of trade, they had to get a coat of arms which meant their pedigrees had to pass muster with the College of Heralds (although this could often be finessed with the right payments to the King and then to the herald).

So if Ralph Spicer was in England, he would probably have started by getting his hands on enough land that he could pretend that he wasn’t a spice merchant any more or to give it up altogether, then gotten himself a Justiceship by knowing the right people or bribing people, then making sure that his kids were squiring for a local knight and then marrying them off to any impoverished nobility in the area, and then making a bid for a knighthood and hope to ascend from there.

But Westeros is less legalistic and bureaucratic than that, at least as how GRRM describes it. It could be as easy as Ralph getting his hand on a bunch of land then paying off a hedge knight to make all of his sons knights.

Speaking of legendary sacred kings, do you think there was a historical King Arthur?

I’m a firm “maybe.”

On the one hand, he pops up in a number of chronicles and poems, so clearly he was someone people thought existed before Geoffrey of Monmouth showed up and whacked the collective imagination of Western Europe with a 2×4 until no one could think about King Arthur without thinking about his version.

On the other hand, he only shows up in chronicles that come several hundred years after when he was supposed to have existed, and doesn’t show up in earlier chronicles that were more contemporary to when he was supposed to be alive.

So as they say in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.“

Politics of the Seven Kingdoms: The Reach (Part I)

credit to ser-other-in-law Hey folks, so this essay is looking like it’s going to be as long as the Westerlands essay if not longer, so I decided to pre-emptively break it up into pieces so it’s easier to read (and write, to be honest). Part I covers the geography and prehistory of the Reach, Part II will cover the rise of House Gardener and the construction of the Reach as a polity, Part III…

View On WordPress

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Tyrion II, ASOS

“And my father? Who does he have spying on me?”
This time the eunuch laughed aloud. “Why, me, my lord.”
Synopsis: Tyrion meets with Varys (yay!) and then with Shae (boooo!).
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
(more…)

View On WordPress