Tag: House Lannister

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? 

Considering that the Lannisters currently control the Iron Throne, how does the crown’s debts to Casterly Rock work? Are the Lannisters now in debt to themselves?

As far as House Lannister is concerned, the Iron Throne belongs to House Baratheon; indeed, they must uphold that fiction at every point if they are to have any pretense of legitimacy. Hence, the debts of Robert Baratheon are passed on to his heirs, Joffrey and Tommen.

Now, it is entirely possible for Tywin to forgive those debts, as Tyrion asks him to. Tywin’s refusal is more personal in nature; he’s spent his entire life paying the king’s debts, first with Aerys II and then with Robert, and he views the reign of King Joffrey as where he will be repaid in every sense of the word. 

Tywin’s refusal, and Cersei’s blind spot in this matter, points to a certain failure of imagination on the part of the Lannisters, that they don’t think of the Iron Throne and House Lannister as part of a single institution – in which case, the best strategy would be to forgive the Iron Throne’s debt, massively improving the Crown’s financial standing and allowing them to deal with Braavos and the Faith without need for default or concession – but rather see the Iron Throne as a means of extracting power and wealth for House Lannister. 

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. 

Historically, how (if at all) did House Lannister control the flow of gold and silver from their vassal’s mines/vaults into the Westerosi and wider Essosi markets? We know that controlling the availability of these precious metals is of paramount importance, yet given the environment the story plays out in, could this even be done? Have these methods changed since the unification of the Seven Kingdoms under House Targaryen? – Thank You, RSAfan.

Good question!

Well, to a large extent, the Lannisters can pull a De Beers: since they have the largest supply, they can set the price by restricting or loosening the flow from their own vaults. 

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Now, in IRL, gold mines required royal licenses. Given that different Houses have their own mines in the Westerlands, it doesn’t seem to have been the case that House Lannister had that kind of system. (Maybe the De Beers technique was good enough that they didn’t have to?) 

Without outside intervention like Aegon I, how do you think the Westerosi Great Game would have continued? Did any Kingdoms have the power to create supra-national Kingdoms like Arlan III or Harwyn Hardhand did? Was greater unification among the Andals inevitable/already in development?

Great question!

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(credit to HotbrownDoubleDouble for the map)

So, when Aegon I started up, Harren Kingdom of the Isles and Rivers was clearly on the offensive:

“…but the most belligerent kings of Aegon’s time were the two whose realms lay closest to Dragonstone, Harren the Black and Argilac the Arrogant. From their great citadel Storm’s End, the Storm Kings of House Durrandon had once ruled the eastern half of Westeros from Cape Wrath to the Bay of Crabs, but their powers had been dwindling for centuries. The Kings of the Reach had nibbled at their domains from the west, the Dornishmen harassed them from the south, and Harren the Black and his ironmen had pushed them from the Trident and the lands north of the Blackwater Rush…
North of the Blackwater, the riverlands were ruled by the bloody hand of Harren the Black of House Hoare, King of the Isles and the Rivers. Harren’s ironborn grandsire, Harwyn Hardhand, had taken the Trident from Argilac’s grandsire, Arrec, whose own forebears had thrown down the last of the river kings centuries earlier. Harren’s father had extended his domains east to Duskendale and Rosby. Harren himself had devoted most of his long reign, close on forty years, to building a gigantic castle beside the Gods Eye, but with Harrenhal at last nearing completion, the ironborn were soon free to seek fresh conquests. No king in Westeros was more feared than Black Harren, whose cruelty had become legendary all through the Seven Kingdoms.”

Hence why, when Aegon started, Argilac Durrandon and Sharra Arryn both approached Aegon about an anti-Harren alliance, with Argilac hoping to “establish the Targaryens along the Blackwater as a buffer between his own lands and those of Harren the Black,” and Sharra looking for “all the lands east of the Green Fork of the Trident for the Vale’s support against Black Harren.” Although if you want a good sense of how crab-bucket politics the Great Game could get, consider that Princess Meria of Dorne approached Aegon with a plan to gang up on the Stormlands…So you have two dynamics at once: a bunch of players wanting to pounce on the declining Stormlands to get what they can while they can, but also a number of players seeing the Ironborn as the new threat that needs to be jumped on with both feet lest they win the Great Game. 

With no Aegon, I would imagine Harren would keep pushing south as the Durrandons ran out of steam…up until a crucial point, probably during a siege of Storm’s End. Then you’d see a couple things happen: first, the Vale would launch an invasion of the eastern Riverlands to “liberate their Andal brethren from the heathens.” Second, the Rock and the Reach will announce that “Harren the Black is a threat to all of Westeros,” and promptly invade the Riverlands from the west and the south…although maybe they’ll do something weird like launching a joint naval invasion of the Iron Islands at the same time. Third, Harren will be forced to pull back, and everything turns into a blood bath in the Riverlands. 

And the Great Game would shift, likely with the Iron Islands reduced, the Riverlands divided (probably with the Westerlands grabbing Riverrun and the Trident, the Reach trying to grab everything from Stony Sept to Lord Harroway’s Town to Maidenpool and overreaching, and the Arryns fighting the Reachermen for Crackclaw Point and the Westermen for the Ruby Ford), and everything in chaos. The Durrandons might luck out with a rump state against fierce Dornish pressure – although who knows, maybe a Gardener decides to get their own back for Garth X by burning Sunspear or something, and that gives them enough breathing room to rebuild their fortunes. Oh and I’m sure that a Gardener will start talking about “saving the Stormlands from the Dornish” and the claims of Garth VII’s daughters. 

So yeah, there’s plenty of ways to redraw the map to build multi-national states – the problem is the Great Game makes all of this unstable as hell, because it’s designed to prevent anyone from winning. 

Politics of the Seven Kingdoms: The Westerlands, Part I

Politics of the Seven Kingdoms: The Westerlands, Part I

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credit to J.E Fullerton/Ser Other-in-Law Introduction: If Part IV of this series was about trying to figure out why the Riverlands, with all its natural advantages, nonetheless became a failed state, and thus come to a better understanding of the dynamics of successful state-building, this essay (and Part VII on the Reach) will be an exploration of what we can learn about the pre-Aegon balance of…

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Do you think the Lannisters’ limitless gold wealth has promoted rentierism in the Westerlands analogous to that seen in oil-rich countries today? Are the Lannisters less dependent on their bannermen than other Great Houses? Tywin’s personal grudge against loans notwithstanding, would you predict such wealth to lead to redistributive rather than productive tendencies in the Westerlands economy? While a seeming strength, has it prevented the development of strong institutions in the long run?

Excellent question! No, it hasn’t, for the most part, because of the extreme financial conservativism of House Lannisters, which I’ve covered here. This is the key quote:

“…some borrowed heavily from Casterly Rock, then failed to repay the loans. When it was seen that Lord Tytos was willing to extend such debts, even forgive them, common merchants from Lannisport and Kayce began to beg for loans as well.

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Given their enormous liquid reserves, it came as something of a shock to find out that it was seen as a major (and negative) departure from policy for the Lannisters to loan money to their commercial sector. While dumping all of their reserve onto the market at once would be a bad idea, not providing any liquidity to the merchant class has beyond a shadow of a doubt held back the economic development of the Westerlands economy.

So how do the Lannisters use their wealth? Well, certainly they are less dependent on their bannermen, although as Tytos showed, it’s not a good idea for them to let their bannermen get away with not paying their taxes. But mostly, the Lannisters use their wealth for political advantage, lending out money to houses within and without the Westerlands in exchange for political favors. 

lauren, i was just thinking about how much gold casterly rock actually has, and how they use that gold, and now im asking you this: how much power do they actually have? like if a lord or king of casterly rock decided to like. buy all of westeros and become the emperor of the continent, could he do that? they already own debts from the iron throne. could they like? buy kings’s landing? or the entire industry of westeros and become merchant kings? this sounds silly but like. it’s so much gold

Excellent question! My answer will come in two parts, relating to different ways to think about money. 

The first has to do with the relationship of money to land in a feudal society. As I explained with regards to Littlefinger:

If you’re asking why he doesn’t have more land (other than the lands of Harrenhal, which are quite extensive if slightly cursed), it’s that Westeros doesn’t have a free market in land, wherein land becomes a fungible commodity that can be bought and sold at will and abstracted into derivatives and futures, etc.

Land in Westeros is distributed through feudal relationships that are traditional and customary in nature – fiefdoms are hereditary, taxation and rent levels are fixed, and tenancies are more likely to involve feudal obligations than pure cash rents.

Karl Polayni, in his masterwork Great Transformation, identified the transition from feudalism to capitalism as the creation of a free market in land, labor, and money where none had existed before: the feudal contracts that stretched from the king on high all the way down to the peasant on the manor had to be destroyed so that land could be bought and sold as a commodity; serfdom had to be abolished and the commons enclosed to first free the peasants from the land they were bound to and then drive them into the factories; and usury laws that had hampered lending money for profit needed to be abolished to allow the banking industry to flourish. 

This hasn’t yet happened in Westeros, for the most part. The only mention that land can be bought comes from the extended Westerlands chapter, where at Ellyn Reyne’s “urging, Lord Tarbeck expanded his domain by buying the lands of the lesser lords and landed knights about him… and taking by force the holdings of those who refused to sell.” The canonicity of this event being in question, nevertheless the context suggests extra-legality, with cash payment being used to mask violent seizure. 

So even if they wanted to, no I don’t think the Lannisters could buy Westeros. I’d also point out that it would never occur to them to do so; as I’ve said before, the Lannisters are aristocrats and have an aristocrat’s conception of money rather than a merchant’s conception of money. Gold becomes land by buying swords to take it, not by going to a market like some Pentoshi cheesemonger.

The second has to do with inflation, as @joannalannister​ suggested. As I wrote here, the size of the Westerosi economy itself acts as a limiter on House Lannister’s ability to spend its gold:

The danger of dumping 18 billion gold into the Westerosi economy is that you’d generate a wave of hyper-inflation so bad that you’d make the Spanish Price Revolution look like a mere stock market hiccup. While in the long run providing the liquidity necessary for Westeros-and indeed even Planetos-wide economic development, the short-term implications would be the destruction of the Westerlands economy, as skyrocketing inflation would destroy the value of our reserves, cause our goods to be non-competitive, and cause the price of food to soar faster than wages, leading to massive socio-economic conflict.

When the Kingdom of Spain conquered Mexico and Peru in the late 15th-early 16th centuries, they got their hands on the great silver mines of Zacatecas and Potosí, which produced $2.7 trillion in 2015 dollars. This vast tidal wave of precious metals, torn out of the ground by slaves, had the paradoxical effect of destroying Spain’s economy with inflation. Inflation meant that it was far cheaper to import raw materials and manufactured goods into Spain, rather than produce them at home, so manufacturing and even farming went into decline. Rather than invest in agriculture or commerce, the wealthy put their money into government debt instead so as to be repaid in silver. 

And of course, the irony of all of this is that the Crown’s vast treasure hoard by its very vastness destroyed its value. Drunk on their own precious metals, the Kings of Spain tried to conquer all of Europe for Catholicism and the House of Hapsburg, and went bankrupt in the process. As I discuss here:

joannalannister:

@racefortheironthrone estimated that Westeros has an annual GDI of 525 million gold, while I think the Lannisters have an annual income of approximately 6 million gold. The Lannisters’ annual income is a little more than 1% of Westerosi GDI per year. (For comparison, Rockefeller’s entire net worth – not his annual income, but his entire fortune – was 1.5%-2% of GDP.)

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Phillip II of Spain, despite all the gold and
silver of Mexico and Peru, went bankrupt four times (1557, 1560, 1575, and 1596),
and historians suggest that his *personal* debts were equal to 60% of Spain’s
GDP at the time..

It got so bad that during the Dutch Revolt, which lasted from 1568-1648 (if you want to know where all the money was going…), that Phillip II had to get his financing and supplies from the Dutch because no one else would lend him money to pay for his war against the Dutch. The Dutch bankers agreed to finance him at exorbitant rates of interest, and then turned around and used his own money to support the rebellion against the Spanish. 

So the Lannisters have to tread lightly when it comes to their gold…

Shouldn’t the Lannisters try to become a naval power given their wealth and proximity to the Iron Islands?

They have some naval power – 25 warships isn’t nothing. And at times they have had more: there was the extended war with the Iron Islands during the Famine Winter over the mutilation of Lelia Lannister, there was Gerold Lannister’s raid of the Iron Islands to take his hundred hostages, Tommen II’s great golden fleet lost in Valyria, Tommen I’s fleet which he used to bring Fair Isle into the Kingdom of the Rock.

But something happened at some point to moderate the Lannisters’ naval ambitions, and led them to discourage Fair Isle from maintaining a navy of its own despite the Ironborn threat. Not sure what that was; it’s possible that, after the Conquest, the Lannisters thought they didn’t need a navy since they could call upon the Royal Fleet.