Were guerilla and Fabian tactics feasible in the medieval period? I know the Romans employed the concept (hence Fabian tactics), but it seems like most nobles would be a little averse to it given that it requires more decentralized leadership and a more empowered populace to maintain supplies, morale, equipment, etc.

Absolutely.

If you look at the history of the various wars between Wales and Norman England, leading up to Edward I’s conquest, the Welsh enjoyed their biggest successes when they used guerrilla tactics against the better-equipped but slower English armies, using a combination of the longbow, hit-and-run tactics, and the Welsh mountains as secure refuges.

Likewise, Bertrand du Guesclin, Marshal of France from 1370-1380, took over after the disasters of Crecy and Poiters, and used Fabian tactics to great effect in Brittany, Castille, and Poitiers, reversing most of the French losses from that phase of the Hundred Years War.

Simon Rumble Asks: Daemon’s Riverlands strategy

So Daemon invaded the Riverlands with the force of two kingdoms behind him and most likely dangled the Lord Paramountcy of the Riverlands in front of rebellious and powerful lords like the Freys, Lothstons, Brakens, etc. How badly did the Riverlands get crushed?

How did his invasion differ from the Lannisters in OTL?

Well, we know almost nothing about Daemon’s strategy in this theater, so it’s hard to say how it differed. Although I’m guessing that, with those rebellious lords in his coalition, he didn’t go with Tywin’s reaving.

But to me, the main difference is that the Riverlands were divided during the Blackfyre Rebellions. And, as we see with the various invasions of the Riverlands – the invasion by the Stormlanders where the Blackwoods invited in the Stormlanders to help them overthrow the Teagues, the invasion by the Ironborn where the Brackens sided with the Hoares to revenge themselves on the Brackens – when the Riverlands are divided, they lose badly.

how many ships / of what type would you expect the riverlands brown water navy to have? would it be organized with each lord having a small fleet, or would it be more like the vikings where every river town has a few ships for community use that the lord would then draft into a fleet as needed?

Well, we don’t see anyone but House Tully itself with a riverrine navy, so I’m guessing they’re the only one with one.

And in terms of type, according to Jaime I they are “river galley[s]…nine oars on each side, which means eighteen men.” More, if they crowded on fighters as well as rowers. And larger sails than ours…” These are pretty small vessels, even by Ironborn standards, but against ground forces trying to ford a river, they’d be incredibly potent.

How should Edmure have handled the Lannister invasion of the Riverlands?

I addressed this in Cat VII of AGOT, but basically he should have done the opposite of what he did – rather than trying to defend every square inch of Riverlands territory, he should have relied on the rivers as defensive multipliers and in general, traded space for time while he was still mobilizing.

Vance and Piper’s 4,000 men were never going to be able to stop Jaime’s army in the open field – but they could have shadowed Jaime’s advance and slowed it down, giving Edmure time to rally and drill his troops, and then gotten across the river ahead of Jaime. With these 4,000 men still in hand, Edmure would have been at least numerically equal and most likely numerically superior to Jaime’s army – but he likely still would have been outnumbered by both Jaime and Tywin’s armies, so I would not have advised going on the offensive at this point.

However, as we saw in the OTL Battle of the Fords, the rivers give significant defensive advantages – they funnel the enemy into a limited number of crossing points, negating the advantage of the Lannisters’ bigger armies and allowing Edmure to establish local superiority of numbers, and the crossing itself leaves their forces exposed to missile fire and in danger of being wiped out when counter-attacked. The Tully river-navy could have been used here to great effect, both as siege platforms and essentially mini-castles that you can use to block crossing points.

Essentially, Edmure should have done the Battle of the Fords in reverse. This may well have meant a siege of Riverrun – so be it, that’s what Riverrun was for. Potentially, he could have stopped the Lannisters there, allowing Robb to link up with the Riverlander army and fight a weakened Lannister opponent. But at the very least, it would have prevented the Riverlanders from being routed and allowing the Lannisters to run rampant with no one there to stop them.

Even if Jaime and/or Tywin had managed to force a crossing, you leave a garrison at Riverrun to hold the castle, and pull back to the next defensive line – the Blue Fork (and then the Green Fork) in the north and/or various castles in the hills country in the south (ultimately, you’re going to be using Harrenhal as the place to stop any southern thrust). Keep making the Lannisters charge headlong at strong defenses, use your cavalry to attack the Lannisters guerrilla-style along the way just like the Riverlanders did in the Dance of the Dragons when the Lannisters tried marching through the Riverlands, and again, buy yourself time.

How effective do you think the wildlings are as a fighting force? Much is made of their lack of disclipline, which I assume in the context to mean their lack of battlefield formations and advanced tactics. Are they truly ineffective, and if so, how far do their great numbers go towards compensating for that?

Keep in mind, only about a third of their entire force are fighters. And while Mance is clearly trying to teach them how to form shield walls and fight on horseback, they’re clearly not fully trained or well-equipped.

To me, the analogy here is Boudicca. Her Iceni and Trinovanti forces were capable of wiping out significant detachments of Romans (as at the Battle of Camulodunum) when those forces were isolated, outnumbered, poorly led, and caught off-guard. But give the Romans time to get into formation and let them choose the terrain, as at the Battle of Watling Street, and the Iceni/Trinovanti’s lack of ability to use their numbers in an effective fashion turned them into so much wheat for the reaper man.

Is ASOIAF noble’s use of a permanent garrison realistic? How common were permanent guards during times of peace in the Middle Ages? Where did they come from (levies, sons of soldiers…)? How many guards could the Earl of Salisbury afford, for example?

Sure, it’s realistic – depending on what period you’re talking about.

Generally speaking, the earlier you go, the more the army looks purely feudal – land is literally divvied up by how much it takes to support a heavily-armed and armored mounted soldier – whether we’re talking about the knight’s fee/knight-service as a unit of land in England, or the fief du haubert (i.e, a fief that can pay for a hauberk of chainmail) in France – and armies are made almost entirely out of men providing military service as their rent.

For reasons that have been talked about in the fandom a lot, this was always a bit of a pain for rulers – armies take a long time to assemble, armies start to dissolve if the fighting lasts longer than the term of service laid down in their contracts, and so on. It was also not hugely popular from the lower end either – once they’ve got their nice fief, and especially once that fief becomes hereditary and much harder for kings to revoke or transfer, military service for the higher ups interferes with your nice local land-grabs and feuds, managing your estate, hawking and hunting, and the other pastimes of the aristocracy.

So somewhere between the 12th and 13th centuries across a wide swathe of Medieval Europe, people came up with the scutage as an alternative. This is a cash tax paid in lieu of military service, and it was rather convenient all-around. It meant that the king had regular cash-in-hand (especially once they figured out you could impose a scutage during peace time as well as during a war) and could hire mercenaries to supplement their feudal levies, and it meant that landowners who didn’t want to fight could pay cash instead. And the popularity of this system meant that increasingly armies were more professional and less feudal in nature.

And this is how we get to the situation around the time of the Wars of the Roses where we have what historian Charles Plummer called bastard feudalism. In this period – the 14th through 16th centuries – kings and nobles realized that it was a lot easier to convert rents and taxes from service into cash, and then use that cash to hire people to fight for them, than the old feudal system. In this new system, people would join the affinity of a nobleman and, in addition to room and board and cash and an inside track to lands and appointments, would wear the livery of their patron. And nobles found out that they could afford to hire a lot more people this way than with the old land-sharing system. Hence the phenomenon of over-mighty vassals who could put a lot more men under arms than the monarch could deal with their more traditional armies – and why Edward IV and Henry VII both spent a good deal of their reigns trying to abolish the system.

Now, who were these men who were fighting for a living? Well, one thing to understand is that, from the beginning of this period, there’s always been a class of people who took room and board and a cash wage to serve as permanent soldiers of a household – the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians had their housecarls; the Franks had their socii or scara, who served as the retainers and bodyguards of the various counts, dukes, kings, and emperors; and so on. Later on, the impact of primogeniture within the nobility meant that you had a significant population of men who had been trained as knights who weren’t going to get land – those men need work. During “bastard feudalism,” it gets even more complicated, because you had iterative affinities as the Earl of Salisbury’s affinity was part of the larger Neville affinity, and he would have had lesser lords in his affinity.

As for examples – the Earl of Salisbury during the Wars of the Roses had a personal affinity of at least a thousand men, while the Earls of Darby had about 2,000 men in their affinity, and so on.

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Tyrion XIV, ACOK

Simon Rumble Asks: Daeron in Dorne

1. How did Daeron recruit a force that size? I understand from your Blacks ad Red series that the lords were promised political favor and new land. What did the common men stand to gain besides honor, gold and a glorious death?

2. How large was the host personally under Daeron’s command? Was it a mix of stormlanders/reachermen/crownlanders or was the source a single province?

3. Can you elaborate on the logistics of the Dornish campaign? How do you forage in Dorne considering the state of agricultural output and water scarcity? How do you resupply horses and pack animals?

4. How do knights campaign in Dorne? Wouldn’t the weight of their armor and the intense heat force them to abandon their arms? How did this influence their tactics?

5. Was the Conquest of Dorne inspired by the crusades?

1. Well, it’s a feudal army. Daeron calls upon his Lords Paramount, they bring their own household troops and call upon their vassals, who bring their own household troops and call upon their knights, who are bound by feudal oath to not only fight themselves but bring some infantry as well. Some of the common soldiers are there partly out of legal obligation – it’s probably part of the contract that gives them the right to their land – but most of them are professional soldiers who earn their living by fighting.

2. It doesn’t say precisely how many men Daeron commanded, but given that he “divided his host into three forces,” I’d say about a third of the overall army and somewhere between 20,000 and 90,000 men. Given that Lord Tyrell was likely in command of most of the Reachermen, and Lord Oakenfist was likely in command of most of the Crownlanders, and the fact that Daeron attacked via the Boneway, I’d say his army was probably mostly made up of Stormlanders.

3. The main logistical innovation that allowed Daeron to succeed was almost certainly Oakenfist’s naval superiority, which would have allowed both Daeron and Lyonel Tyrell to resupply by making a forced march to the headwaters of the Greenblood (and in Daeron’s case, probably via the coast as well).

4. Look to the history of the Crusades, where knights fought in full armor throughout, and indeed many of the Crusader victories were due to their heavy armor, leading the Turks to dub them “men of iron.” It’s not ideal, but you can adapt – chiefly, by wearing robes of light cloth over your armor so it doesn’t heat up. But the heavily-armored knights were actually quite successful against their lighter opponents – as long as they didn’t let themselves get drawn out and surrounded, the weight of the heavy cavalry was actually an asset because it added momentum and shock to the charge, literally bowling over the enemy.

5. Yeah, there’s elements of the Crusades – especially the parallel between Oakenfist’s seizure of the Greenblood and Richard of England’s use of ships along the Mediterannean coast to resupply his army as it marched south from Antioch to Arsuf. But there’s also elements of Alexander’s conquests – the goat track, the extreme young age of the commander. And there’s elements of Caesar’s Gallic Wars – Daeron’s book and the three kinds of Dornishmen come from Caesar’s commentaries on his conquest, which begin with the line “gallia omnis divisa est in tres partes.” (All Gaul is divided into three parts)

Do you think Westrosi knights are as good at horsemanship and mounted combat as Dothraki? Knights spend a great deal of time practicing the art; they even travel the kingdom going to tournaments to display this skill. Does that put them close?

As good is hard to say. They learn a completely different kind of mounted combat from the Dothraki and depending on a number of factors (terrain, coordination with infantry, skill of leadership, etc.) it might match up horribly or well with the Dothraki model.

To use some real world examples: the Mongols beat the shit out of European knights when they first came in contact with them. The Mongols also beat the living hell out of the Arabs and the Turks who often used the same kind of feigned retreat, highly mobile, all-cavalry, horse-archer-based tactics that the Mongols did. Is the reason that the Mongols beat the Europeans is that horse archers are better than knights full-stop, or because Genghis Khan’s armies were some of the best-trained and best-led soldiers in world history?

To further extend my argument: Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, who had sacked Baghdad and brought the Abbasid Caliphate to an end, two years later got completely demolished by the Mamluks of Egypt at Ain Jalut and the First Battle of the Horns. Sixty years after the first and successful Mongol invasion of Europe, the Mongols invaded Poland and Hungary again and were beaten badly.

So is that technology or the other myriad factors (leadership, numbers, terrain, logistics, weather, pure blind luck) that can determine victory or defeat? I lean to the latter.