heya, love the blog and you got me into history, so i wanted to ask you a question: rome unified most of europe and parts of asia and africa during the rupublic/empire. after the fall of Rome itself why didnt the italians reconciled their territory? why did the byzanthines and the lobards and venice didnt try to get their historical birthright?

Well, I think your question sort of answers itself. Italy wasn’t unified after the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire because there were multiple claimants to the territory.

In the Gothic War alone, you had the Byzantines (backed up by Huns, Lombards, Slavs, and other foreign allies) against the Ostrogoths (who were in turn supported by the Franks, Burgundians, Alamanni). However, that statement makes things seem way more straightforward than they actually were, because those allies often became their own sides, as we see from the Franks, who turned on the Ostrogoths and almost succeeded in defeating both them and the Byzantines if it hadn’t been for a very timely outbreak of dysentery, and from the Lombards, who started out as Byzantine allies and ended up conquering most of Italy soon after Justinian’s death.

And complicating the “historical birthright” narrative is the fact that the Ostrogoths were legally allies of the Empire, a lot of their leaders had received a Roman education and worked hand-in-hand with the Roman Senate, the surviving Roman bureaucracy, and the Catholic Church (despite the fact that they were personally Arians rather than Chalcedonians), so could arguably be considered to have as much of a claim to said birthright as the Greek-speaking, Orthodox Byzantine invaders.

How expensive would an education at the Citadel be? Do acolytes have to pay for lodging and food? What would be a good historical comparison to make?

Well, medieval universities would be the proper comparison, but they’re a bit tricky. For the most part, the universities themselves didn’t charge tuition, although the University of Paris did start charging two sous a week (roughly a pound a year, which isn’t nothing) starting in the 12th century.

Instead, individual teachers charged fees for students who wanted to attend lectures. These fees could vary immensely – from 12 pence a year in Oxford for an undergraduate degree to 100 lire a year in Bologna for a law degree.

And I would imagine they would have to pay for lodging and food, as medieval students did too, although often there were student rates and lots of collective student institutions to help defray the costs.

How common was it for a master blacksmith (like Tobho Mott) to move to another city and practice his skill. Were there guild restrictions on moving to safeguard their monopolies? Would he be restricted from teaching certain things to foreign apprentices? And more importantly how would they enforce this?

It’s more that guilds managed the distribution of workers, so that there weren’t too many workers in a given area relative to how much work there was for them. Now, masters tended to have much more freedom than journeymen in terms of where they could go, because that’s part of what it meant to be a master, but there were still internal pressures to not overcrowd the market.

So it would depend on the local economy. If there is a scarcity of local blacksmiths, a foreign master would be readily welcomed, as masters were required to train apprentices and employ journeymen, so a new master would (over time) create new jobs in that industry. If there were a lot of local blacksmiths, there might be resistance, b/c the argument would be that additional masters would split the work too much.

In terms of enforcement, this is where guild charters came in: guild regulations had the force of law within that industry, so if you tried to move to a city after being refused permission (and thus weren’t licensed), you could be sued in court and the local gendarmes could expel you from the city.

You have explained many times that there really isn’t a market for land because of feudal contracts, but how do ‘urban’ property rights work in a medieval setting? Do people own the buildings but not the land? Do they also own the land? Do urban property owners owe any taxes to the city or the lord who controls it?

Great question!

Unless one owned the freehold, then most people didn’t own the land that their buildings were on top of. Instead, what tended to happen was that people would take out very long leases on property. For example, even when Thomas Cromwell hit the big time, becoming Master of the Jewels and Clerk of the Hanaper in 1532, in order to expand his main London residence, he had to take out a ninety-nine year lease from the Augustinian Friars who had been his landlords for several decades. Moreover, there could be very complex chains of sub-tenancies, where people would take out a lease from the freeholder and then rent out properties to people who might then rent out spare rooms, etc.

To answer your question about taxes, if someone was living in a city in the legal sense, i.e a geographic corporation that held a municipal charter, then they were usually not controlled by a lord and would owe taxes only to the monarch, although often the “borough rights” that came with a municipal charter often involved freedom from some forms of taxes and feudal incidences.

If the king and his entourage came to stay with one of his vassals, would the vassal be expected to foot the bill or would the Crown pay some? What about one lord staying with another?

The king would absolutely not pay the bill. Indeed, half of the point of the king going on royal progress and crashing at his vassals’ houses was to gently bankrupt them so they didn’t have enough cash on hand to rebel against you.

I’m not familiar with sub-infeuded examples of the same process. I’m guessing it depends on the terms of the feudal contract, because some of them could be very specific about the responsibilities of the vassal to provide various services and goods when the liege lord came to visit:

Moreover I acknowledge that, as a recognition of the above fiefs, I and my successors ought to come to the said monastery, at our own expense, as often as a new abbot shall have been made, and there do homage and return to him the power over all the fiefs described above. And when the abbot shall mount his horse I and my heirs, viscounts of Carcassonne, and our successors ought to hold the stirrup for the honor of the dominion of St. Mary of Grasse; and to him and all who come with him, to as many as two hundred beasts, we should make the abbot’s purveyance in the borough of St. Michael of Carcassonne, the first time he enters Carcassonne, with the best fish and meat and with eggs and cheese, honorably according to his will, and pay the expense of shoeing of the horses, and for straw and fodder as the season shall require…

(Feudal Contract of Bernard Atton, Viscount of Carcassonne, 1110 CE)

So if there’s a similar clause as the one bolded above, then the vassal would be obligated to provide those services, but otherwise probably not.

Vox Populi, Vox Deii: Elections in ASOIAF, Part II

Introduction

For his second foray into electioneering in AFFC, George R.R Martin clearly decided to go with a simpler model that would (among other things) require less math than the repeated ballots of the Night’s Watch, one that harkens back to the elections and democratic processes of the (early) Middle Ages.

As I talked about in Part I, the Althing of Iceland dates back to the 10th century…

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What was the effect of the Roman Empire being able to tax enough to support its army upon its populace? With medieval governments being smaller than the Roman one, did that mean a peasant in medieval Europe was taxed more lightly and was economically better off than his Roman counterparts? Or, was the Empire able to tax the wealthy more effectively, or have a more productive economy due to the sort-of globalization inside the Roman world? Or, did medieval taxes just support nobility lifestyles?

The main effect seems to have been a great deal of internal economic growth and peace, as we can see from the fact that Roman cities grew in size but didn’t build walls until the crisis of the third century.

In terms of your second question, I lean more towards the effective taxation of the wealthy angle (at least at the height of the Empire’s power), as medieval taxes tended to have higher rates and more regressive forms to make up for the fact that the medieval state often didn’t tax the wealthy effectively.

Calculating GDP per capita in premodern eras is extremely difficult, but it does seem as if there was decline or stagnation at best in living standards between 1 AD and 1000 AD, with a slow recovery during the High and Late Middle Ages, which picked up steam during the Renaissance and Early Modern eras, and then really took off following the Industrial Revolution.

Why did the hunnic invasion lead to the Germanic people migrating west but the rise of Rome didn’t cause a eastern migration

I’m guessing that by the rise of Rome, you mean the expansion of Rome north and east into Gaul, Germania, Illyricum, Dalmatia, Pannonia, Dacia, etc.

I think part of the reason is that the Romans actually didn’t push that far northeast; the decision to stop at the Rhine and the Danube limited the “push” factor eastward. Likewise, the Roman policy of trade and tribute, establishing client kingdoms in Germania, Dacia, Sarmatia, etc. created a buffer zone that could absorb eastward migration.

And sadly, I think another part of it has to do with the Roman practice of imperialism, that the focus was on conquering and then Romanizing people where they were as opposed to driving them off the land, but even more so the focus was on enslaving people, which meant that people who might have become refugees to the east instead moved south into the Mediterranean slave markets.

How exactly does slighting a castle work?

To quote Richard Nevell, an archaelogist who did his thesis on the subject:

“One of the key challenges in identifying slighting is that the methods used to slight a castle were the same used while attacking it. For example, mining or undermining was used in siege warfare to bring down outer walls. But you could use the same approach to demolish a castle. This can be seen at Bungay Castle (Suffolk) where excavations in the 1930s identified an unfinished mine gallery underneath the great tower. Documentary sources show that the King had ordered its destruction, but it was evidently reprieved at a late stage.”

Given that the objective is to render the structure incapable of being used as a fortification, the focus would be on those aspects of a castle that give it defensive advantages:

the outer walls, which allow a small garrison to hold off the enemy from a safe distance.
the towers, which provide further height and protection compared to relatively open ramparts.
gatehouses, which protect the most important entryways with portcullises, arrow-loops, machiolations, and murder holes.

Depending on how emphatic the slighter wanted to be, they could leave the rest of the structure intact and allow it to continue to exist as a

château

(a non-fortified stately home), or they could render the interior unlivable and let the ruins be subsumed back into nature.

Generally, slighting would be accomplished by mining at the base of the structure in question and then burning down the props of the tunnel (i.e, undermining). Later on, the process was sped up enormously with the use of gunpowder, which could be straighforwardly detonated in mere minutes. For the destruction of interior elements, pulling down roofs and then firing the interior was usually sufficient.

How did the greco-roman era galley evolve over time? From what Ive heard the late medieval galleys were rather different/improved compared to them?

So I’ve written a bit about it here and here.

From what I’ve read, the galley transformed in a number of ways:

Size: galleys tended to get longer and have deeper drafts, which allowed them to hold more cargo (which was important for ensuring that galleys could offset their operating and repair costs) and lots of oarsmen (150-180 on the great galleys of the Venetian Republic).
Decks: galleys shifted from half-decks to full decks, which means you can put more people on the deck to board/repel boarders/launch missiles. Also, galleys tended to add on fore and/or aft-castles, which were very useful for protecting your ranged marines from boarders and giving them the ability to drop missiles on the enemy deck from above. Also, later galleys tended to have higher sides to help deal with very low-in-the-water vessels like the ubiquitious longship.
Sails: galleys tended to acquire more masts and shifted from square to lateen sails, which allowed them to move faster and more flexibly (as it’s much easier to tack against the wind with that setup).