Opinions on Gotz von Berlichingen?

A veritable historical badass. For the uninitiated, Gotz was a mercenary who had fought for Frederick of Brandenburg, the Emperor Maximilian I, Albert IV of Bavaria, and a bunch of other Early Modern notables. Famously, Gotz lost his right arm during a siege when, in an incredibly unlikely turn of events, an enemy cannon ball hit the edge of his sword, forcing it down onto his hand and cutting it off.

So, there I think we see an element of Jaime’s mutilation. Unlike the Lannisters, however, Berlichingen was a practical man, if somewhat hot-tempered (Gotz was known for a number of feuds and duels, occasionally capturing various counts or raiding Nuremberg merchants), and he built himself a prosthetic that wasn’t made of a single piece of gold and thus completely useless. Gotz’ prosthetic used a system of hinges and straps to allow the hand to grasp objects. And so Gotz kept on keeping on.

Gotz was also a significant player in the German Peasants’ War of 1524-5, and although he ended up fighting on both sides, was one of the few professional soldiers who fought for the rebels. As a result, Goethe wrote a play about his life, in which Gotz is portrayed as a heroic individualist and national hero. Famously, during the third act, Gotz is put under siege by the imperial army, and when asked to surrender, says:

Mich ergeben! Auf Gnad und Ungnad! Mit wem redet Ihr! Bin ich ein Räuber! Sag deinem Hauptmann: Vor Ihro Kaiserliche Majestät hab ich, wie immer, schuldigen Respekt. Er aber, sag’s ihm, er kann mich im Arsche lecken!

(Me, surrender! At mercy! Whom do you speak with? Am I a robber! Tell your captain that for His Imperial Majesty, I have, as always, due respect. But he, tell him that, he can lick me in the arse!)

What caused the shift from the early medieval court where noble literacy was nonexistent or merely functional and scorned as the arena of clerks, to the post-Renaissance courts of rulers such as Elizabeth I, where courtiers and powerful nobles were praised for their poetry and song-writing?

Largely it had to do with administration and law. Taking England for an example, we see a major change between the reigns of Henry I (named “Beauclerc” because he was actually literate) and Henry II. (I.E, between 1100-1189)

Henry I either created the Exchequer or massively reformed it, so that you now had an audtiting system whereby the Exchequer sent written summons to the sheriffs and other royal officials, requiring them to send accounts for their shire as to tax collection, incomes from royal lands, etc. Now, if you want to be a Sheriff of your shire (which is kind of big deal for your local nobility), or you’re a taxpayer, or you rent land from the king or owe the king money, you need to be able to read when the tax man starts writing to you…

Henry II’s legal reforms massively expanded the system of bailiffs, sheriffs, justices, and courts, all of whom had to send written reports, read royal writs and warrants, and keep written records. Now if you want to get a judicial office (which is also super-important for your local nobility), or if you need to go to court over a land dispute, or if you get sued by somebody, you need to be able to read.

It also helped that following the killing of Thomas Becket, Henry II agreed to the Compromise of Avranches, which allowed people to claim “benefit of clergy” and be tried by the more lenient ecclasiastical courts, but only if you could prove your literacy by reading Psalm 51.

The net result of these changes was that reading became a lot more important – now reading is no longer the province of clerks and other servants (although yes, the clergy had always had a much stronger impetus to be literate, so younger sons of the nobility would be more likely to be literate, etc.) but the path to royal favor and political prominance.

It also helps that in a medieval society, the monarch is a very strong influence on fashion, extending from their person to their court and from their court to everyone who would really like to be part of the court. So when the Kings of England began to be literate starting with Henry Beauclerc, you can’t really get away with saying that reading is for nerds, because that’s lese majeste.

Now, this kicks even more with the Renaissance, where the cultural ideals shift. Now it’s not enough to be a knight holding up the best ideals of chivalry and courtly love, if you want to be fashionable, you need to fit Castiglione’s ideal of the courtier – which literally wrote the book on how to be a “Renaissance Man.” In addition to being athletic and a good soldier, you also had to be genteel in your manners, have a good voice, show good comportment, to be trained in the humanities, classics, and fine arts, and in all of these things, to do them with sprezzatura – i.e, with “nonchelance,” “careful negligence” and “effortlessness and ease.”

In other words, Castilgione invented the idea of being cool.

POLITICS OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS: THE RIVERLANDS (PART II)

Credit to J.E Fullerton/Ser Other-in-Law
When last we left off in the story of the political development of the Riverlands, the grip of the Stormlanders on their province was beginning to slip, and the Ironborn were rowing across Ironman’s Bay, looking to shake it loose for good…
(more…)

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In AGOT it is mentioned that part of the crown’s debt is to several Tyroshi trading cartels. What are those and how old is the word cartel itself anyway?

A cartel is a group of economic actors – either sellers or buyers – who agree to cooperate in an attempt to create an oligopoly that can fix supply and/or demand (and thus prices), market share, and so forth. A trading cabal would probably be focused on trying to control a geographic market, or on trying to corner a given commodity.

In terms of its origin, the use of “cartel” with regards to business dates back to the late 19th century, where it was used in Germany to describe business organization in the new industries (whereas in the Anglo-American sphere, the terms “trust” or “combination” predominated).

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

Credit to J.E Fullerton/Ser Other-in-Law Introduction In Part IV of the Politics of the Seven Kingdoms, we come to the best example of a failed state in Westeros – indeed, the only region of Westeros to ever lose the status of a Kingdom. The Riverlands are a perpetual runner-up in the game of thrones, more often a pawn or even the game board than a real player, despite its relatively large size,…

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How do royal mints work? Like how often do new ones need to be made and why? Sorry if you have been asked this before.

Just to show how much I care…I did research on numismatics for you, and that’s something I once swore I would never do.

Medieval coins were “cold-struck” which means that the planchet or blank were allowed to cool before they were imprinted. They were made by hand, by sticking a planchet in between two dies (the one on top called the trussel die, and the bottom die called the pile die) upon which the design of the coin had been engraved and then hitting the trussel die with a hammer to imprint the planchet with both the obverse and design side at the same time.

The coining was actually the simplest part of the process. Producing the dies took up a lot of time, because the action of smacking them with a hammer inevitably damaged them – to take the Venetian mint as an example, they had to make one trussel die every day and one pile die every other day, because when you’re punching out 20,000 coins a day, the dies are going to get damaged in a hurry. Making the blanks was also a rather complicated process and took up a huge amount of time:

melting and casting the ingots,
annealing, or heat treating, the ingots to soften them,
hammering the ingots,
another annealing,
cutting the ingots into blanks,
annealing the blanks,
hammering the blanks thinner,
another annealing,
another hammering of the blanks,
another annealing,
another hammering of the blanks,
rolling and
hammering the edges to make the blanks rounder,
another annealing,
blanching to clean the blanks
and then finally coining.

In terms of how often the coins were made and why…part of it had to do with custom: new coins would be minted to celebrate the coronation of a new monarch in order to spread the word about who the new monarch was, new coins would also be minted to celebrate major military victories or weddings or the birth of royal children, or certain religious holidays. But a good bit of it had to do with supply and demand: i.e, when the monarch needs cash to buy stuff or when various vendors bring in royal ious and request payment in cash or when the royal paymasters need to make payroll for the army or the navy, etc.

Speaking of supply and demand, one of the long-term problems with metallic currency is that, over time, they have a deflationary bias – as people hoard coins, money falls out of the system, and prices start to drop in ways that become very dangerous to profit margins and thus economic viability. Thus, you have to mint coins just to make sure that there’s enough coins going around for economic transactions to take place and for the economy to grow. And the problems don’t end there: because metallic coins are easily counterfeited by clipping or sweating or plating, mints were constantly battling Gresham’s Law, which is one of the reasons why medieval punishments for forgery and counterfeiting were so legendarily brutal.

Ultimately it came down to how well things were going for the state. Remember, the coins are made of precious metals, which means you need the raw stuff on hand to mint. When things are going well economically and politically – trade is flowing, the harvest is good, people are paying their taxes – the king mints lots of coins both because he can and to show off his royal splendor and majesty. But when things are going bad – when the harvest fails, trade dries up, people are refusing to pay their taxes, foreign armies are rampaging up and down the countryside stealing everything shiny – first you start to adulterate your coinage with baser metals, then you cheat on the weight of the coinage, then you just stop issuing coins for a while. One of the ways that historians of the ancient world or the medieval period try to assess the strength and stability of various dynasties is just by looking at how frequently coins are being minted, how the weight and purity of the coinage is changing,

If you’re a King on the Iron Throne, you wanted to implement a royal justice system (and abolish the right of pit and gallows), what would be your course of action?

Well, the confusing thing is that, according to the WOIAF, there is both a royal justice system and the right of pit and gallows. So there’s a question about where the dividing line is between royal authority and the privileges of the nobility.

To quote an earlier post of mine:

“Well, let’s take Henry II’s judicial reforms as a jumping-off point: he’s perhaps best known for the Assizes of Clarendon (which in addition to asserting exclusive royal jurisdiction over criminal cases and royal jurisdiction over land disputes, also created some of the first grand juries) where he established the justices in eyre – six judges from Westminster who divided England between them and would travel in a circuit from county to county, covering their entire circuit every two years. He also established permanent judiciaries in the capitol which would eventually be known as the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King’s Bench. And this was pretty much how things went from about 1166 to 1285-1360, where the system of local justices of the peace began to replace the justices in eyre in terms of who does the majority of judicial work.

So if we were talking about providing a judiciary for Westeros, I think you’d probably start with a system of itinerant justices who could cover a good deal of territory between them, and you’d probably stagger the numbers by the size of the territory involved: Iron Islands are pretty small geographically so you could get away with one, Stormlands and Crownlands could probably be covered by two justices each, Westerlands and Vale maybe three or four each given the difficulty of mountain travel, the North and Dorne would probably need 5-6 given the long distances but also the lower population density, and the Reach would probably need 10 or more given the size and high population.”

So the first step is to set up itinerant royal justices so that you have a mechanism by which royal judicial authority is transmitted to the provinces outside of the direct overlordship of the King, and to establish in law that these courts have jurisdiction over certain crimes.

Note that Henry II targeted criminal cases – murder always gets people het up, and given the tendency of private wars between nobles to end in murder, it’s a good excuse to get the lords under warrant – and land disputes, because in a society where land disputes are going to be the majority of legal matters, that makes the royal courts very attractive.

The second step is to establish firmly in law what is already precedent: that the king and his ministers have appelate jurisdiction over judicial disputes between lords, with an eye to extending this into appelate jurisdiction over the judicial decisions of lords. This can also be important for royal authority down the line, because it allows you to overrule local lords and gets the ordinary subject to see the king as an interposing power they can appeal to.

The third step, as suggested by the second, is to maneuver yourself into a situation where A. the king gets a veto over local judicial decisions through appelate jurisdiction over all judicial decisions, and B. local lords are held legally accountable for violating the royal justice code in either action or decision. Perverting the course of justice, embracery, obstruction of justice, misprision of felony, mis- and malfeasance in public office, compounding a felony – there is a long list of old crimes from the Common Law that could be used as a cudgel against lords trying to maintain their tradional privileges.

If Robert should’ve traveled more across the Seven Kingdoms, settling disputes and dispensing justice, how would he go about it (logistically speaking)? What places does he travel to? In what order? How frequently does he do these progresses?

warsofasoiaf:

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.

These naval questions are great! Was there something preventing medieval navies from adding a few ships each year so that you didn’t have huge swings in available forces? It’d seem like it’d be good for both the navy and your shipbuilding industry to have a steady amount of new vessels being ordered rather than huge boom and sink cycles. Thanks!

Glad you like them!

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.

Adding to the ship questions: where do dromonds fit on, and is Aurane Waters’ treachery plausible?

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.