“They can’t hurt me, they’re dying. She took her cup from her bedroll and went to the fountain.”
Synopsis: Arya and the Brotherhood Without Banners visits Stoney Sept, where they debate the ethics of the death penalty and whether Gendry should bone his half-sister, before Arya meets someone from her past.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all…
Skahaz mo Kandaq is a former member of the Ghiscari nobility who, in order to show his devotion to the new regime and his abjuration of his former status (since the Great Masters of Meereen characteristically wear their hair in fanciful updoes), shaves his head. He is the leader of a group of ex-nobles who share both his hairstyle and his politics.
To follow along with my Reconstruction analogy: if the Unsullied represent black Union soldiers and the freedmen represent, well, the freedmen, the Shavepates represent:
“…a very specific historical counterpart, the so-called “scalawag.” Disparagingly named after a kind of runty horse, the scalawags of American Reconstruction were Southern white unionists – residents of the mountainous regions of West Virginia, East Tennessee, the western Carolinas, and Northern Alabama who had resisted secession from the outset, as well as Southerners from other regions who had turned their backs on the Confederacy during the war (through draft resistance or desertion) or after the war (most famously the former Confederate General James Longstreet, who would go on to lead African-American state militias against the paramilitary “White League” in Louisiana).”
Skahaz has something of a Longstreetish parallel, as the leader of the Brazen Beasts who combat the Sons of the Harpy – a parallel to the state militias who tried (usually unsuccessfully) to combat white terrorist organizations like the White League or the Klan. However, in his personal politics, Skahaz is more of a Robespierre stand-in, pushing Dany to adopt ever more militant policies (from torturing suspects to taking hostages to conducting reprisal killings) in response to the ongoing terrorist campaign against her new regime.
Unlike many ASOIAF commentators, I don’t think Skahaz poisoned the locusts. At the same time, I absolutely believe that Skahaz is taking advantage of the situation to try to regain the power he lost following Hizdahr’s rise to power, and to try to complete the revolution that Dany left unfinished. To that end, I’m sure that, while Barristan (and Victarion and Tyrion) wins the Battle of Fire outside the walls of Meereen, Skahaz will solve the problem of the Sons of the Harpy and the threat of counter-revolution by putting the entirety of the Great Masters (including the child hostages) to the sword. Whether he’ll survive Ser Barristan’s reaction, I don’t know.
As I’ve said before, the Shavepate is not a nice man, nor a good man. But he’s also not wrong about what’s going on in Meereen.
“Sansa tried to run, but Cersei’s handmaid caught her before she’d gone a yard.”
Synopsis: a pre-teen girl is forced into marriage with an enemy of her family and for some reason people think she is the bad guy.
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.
Chiefly, flexibility. Because phalanxes fought shoulder-to-shoulder in deep ranks, they were rather slow to move, especially laterally; this meant that they were vulnerable to being flanked. By contrast, the Roman maniple system, being much looser and more decentralized, could respond rapidly to new developments.
This difference was famously worked out at the Battle of Cynocephalae, where the Roman legions initially struggled against the weight of the Macedonian phalanx on the left, but the Romans were able to quickly move twenty maniples to take advantage of the withdrawl of the Macedonians on the right and attack the Macedonians from the flank and the rear, causing a complete panic that shredded the phalanx.
Question 2: Roman Cavalry
I think this has to be understood as a matter of opportunity costs. Training good cavalry takes many years training and a not-inconsiderable amount of resources in terms of horseflesh, so you tend to see premodern societies choosing whether to invest their time and resources into cavalry or infantry. (Same principle goes for archers, btw.)
Since the Romans had primarily an infantry culture, it was much more efficient to hire allied cavalry when and if they were needed and rely instead on their infantry to win the day.
Now this did change over time as the Roman Empire’s borders stretched and came under pressure from horse-riding tribes from outside the Empire, which made the cavalry’s rapid response capabilities more important.
Yes, they were used, although probably a bit more often with horse archers who needed to have hands free for reins and the like. I’m pretty sure they evolved from an earlier practice of storing the bow in the quiver, as we can see here in the upper-right:
You’re right about the stringing and unstringing, since keeping a bow strung all the time is bad for the string and thus the power of the bow. However, if you were expecting a battle or an ambush or the like, you don’t want to be in a position of having to stop and string your bow, so you’d string your bow in advance and then you’d need a way to carry it around, hence a sheathe.
Carrying them on the shoulder is a really bad idea, because moving around with them that way is very awkward and it’s super-easy to catch the bow or the string on something or someone around you.
Longbows are a bit unusual, because they were long enough to be carried like staves, albeit with a cloth cover over them. But you couldn’t really do that with other kinds of bows.
At least in Medieval Europe, monarchs didn’t really have to sacrifice functionality if they didn’t want to. They were certainly wearing the fanciest surcoats and armor, but so were a lot of the nobility. The main difference was the use of a circlet crown affixed to their helmet, so everyone could tell who the king was:
This replica – supposedly of Richard III, who wore a crowned helmet to Bosworth Field, which might have made the whole business of Henry VII finding the crown hanging on a hawthorn bush a bit tricky – shown above is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Henry V used both a crowned helmet (for when he was hanging back in command) and a regular greathelm for when he went into the thick of it), which was a good thing, because he got the latter dented pretty badly at Agincourt. On the other end of the spectrum, Casimir III of Poland rocked this number:
Which just seems like a bit of a pain in the neck, to say the least.
“She felt desperately afraid. Was this what my brother would have done?”
Synopsis: Dany (Ocean) robs Astapor.
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.
Anonymous asked: In your economic development posts how much of the analysis is based on what is known now vs what was known “back then”? How much of what was known to some could reasonably be expected to be known by your average ruler?
I try to stay within the boundaries of what could be known to an early-modern ruler. I.E, no inventing the steam engine out of nowhere.
Obviously, I can’t eliminate presentism entirely, but I try to play fair.
So in general, when I wrote the various economic development plans, I tried to avoid blatant presentism – i.e, no inventing the steam engine and turning the North into an industrial powerhouse complete with trouble t’mill, just because the North has a lot of sheep and that’s how the North of England economically developed in the 18th and 19th centuries.
So in general, I rely on economic development methods that were used in the early-modern period – canal-building, changing agricultural methods, the formation of state-backed joint-stock companies as a means of encouraging international commerce, innovations in banking and finance, investing in manufacturing (especially textiles), and so forth. To my mind, this creates a certain plausibility whereby you could imagine a particularly curious, ambitious, well-traveled, -educated, and -advised ruler of one of the Seven Kingdoms paying attention to what’s going on in the Free Cities and among the merchant and artisan classes of Westeros and pursuing these kind of policies.
There is a certain inescapable element of presentism in that I’m selecting methods of the early-modern period that were successful in their time, which somewhat assumes that economic development will follow a similar path on Planetos. (Although the Free Cities suggests that it’s not far off).
So before the Roman Empire included the east, Greek was the “lingua franca” of the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and because the Roman elite respected Greek as a philosophical and literary language, they left it alone in the East and indeed made it one of the two official languages of the Empire. So for a Greek-speaking resident of the East, you could still continue your day-to-day life and even interact with the Roman state, all without having to learn Latin.
The same factors weren’t really there in the west, where there were a lot of different languages, none of which had the prestige and thus utility of Greek. And while the Roman Empire didn’t try to impose Latin on conquered people in the West, because Latin was the only language of administration, law, military, and business, there was an incredibly strong incentive for the children of the provincal elite to be educated in Latin so that they could become Romanized and advance in society.
That being said, it should be noted that bilingualism in elite circles was the rule in both the West and East through the 5th Century CE. Indeed, for a long time, because Latin was considered the “language of power,” there were complaints that the study of Latin by high-status residents of the Eastern Empire was harming the quality of traditional education in Greek rhetoric.
Yes, they did. To quote Friedrichs’ Early Modern City:
“…This was especially the case in the rapidly expanding metropolitan centers with their sprawling outer districts – the suburbs and faubourgs outside the walls where work and residence patterns were particularly hard to control. Unlicensed artisans and unskilled workers abounded in these outer neighbourhoods, where overlarge parishes and underdeveloped institutions made it difficult to keep track of exactly who lived there.”
This was, however, a somewhat risky strategy, because (for the most part) you still had to get your goods into the city, which meant coming under the legal jurisdiction of the city once again. Not only would imported goods usually be taxed, but trading in unlicensed goods could lead to legal penalties.
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