Steven Xue Asks: Why didn’t Tywin purge Robb’s allies post Red Wedding?

I’m sure you will eventually cover this somewhere down the road, but I have to ask. After the Red Wedding wouldn’t it have been more beneficial in the long term if Tywin had agreed to Joffrey’s wishes on purging Robb Starks former allies?

I know Tywin believes “if your enemies bend the knee you must help them to their feet otherwise nobody will bend the knee to you”. I for one believe in this doctrine as well but I feel that many of the former rebels may still feel very bitter towards the Lannisters for all the grievances they have suffered because of them. So even though they have since the Red Wedding reaffirmed their allegiance to the Crown, there’s no guarantee that most if not all of them will rebel again if given the chance.

Even though the Riverlords and Northern lords have been crushed at the Twins and now possess very limited military strength, they are still in a position to cause the Crown much trouble if opportunity arises. With Lannister power now weakening, many Riverlords especially in the current political climate would want to avenge themselves of the first wedding as well as any other transgressions by the Lannisters, which means they will not only rebel openly but also do it by rallying behind any of the Lannister’s enemies whether they be a Stark, Tully or any of the pretenders to the throne.

I know it would have been more costly and even looked upon unfavorably but in the long run don’t you think that it would have been more sound to have done what Joffrey wanted and eliminated the houses that had followed the Starks in rebellion and most likely still secretly oppose the Crown, while also giving their seats to nobles who are loyal to the Lannisters?

Well, let’s start with a very important factor in this decision: Robb Stark left the Riverlands part of his army behind when he went to the Twins, because he was planning on returning to the North: “aside from her brother Edmure’s modest retinue of friends, the lords of the Trident had remained to hold the riverlands while the king retook the north.” These Riverlords have 11,000 soldiers between them.

And while the Lannisters and Tyrells together have the manpower to destroy these remaining forces, their forces are split between many fronts: initially they have to retake Dragonstone and retake Storm’s End from Stannis, then the Tyrells send men to besiege Brightwater Keep, then the Tyrells send men to threaten King’s Landing if anything happens to Margaery, then the Golden Company lands, etc. And keep in mind, a lot of the Lannister forces demobilize when Tywin’s body is sent back to the Rock.

So the best example of why the Lannisters didn’t do this is the second Siege of Riverrun, where poor Daven is trying to coordinate a military operation with only 1,500 Westermen under his command:

You’ve seen our numbers, Edmure. You’ve seen the ladders, the towers, the trebuchets, the rams. If I speak the command, my coz will bridge your moat and break your gate. Hundreds will die, most of them your own. Your former bannermen will make up the first wave of attackers, so you’ll start your day by killing the fathers and brothers of men who died for you at the Twins. The second wave will be Freys, I have no lack of those. My westermen will follow when your archers are short of arrows and your knights so weary they can hardly lift their blades.

Without the Riverlords, that first wave (which is what really demoralizes Edmure) doesn’t exist and instead the assault will have to go with Freys and Westermen leading the way and maybe the assault fails.

Which brings me to the ultimate point: yes, on paper, the Lannisters and the Tyrells could completely destroy the armed strength of the Riverlands. But when you back someone into the corner, they fight like a trapped rat, and that pushes up the casualty rate. Just look at what happened at Dragonstone, where a token force of men killed a thousand Westermen. Now imagine that happening again and again in dozens of sieges across the Riverlands.

Anon Asks:

When Aegon confirmed the titles of those pledging fealty to him, what does that mean? How does a king confirm the properties of his vassals? Does every king do that when inheriting or just when conquering?

This can get a bit complicated and contradictory, but at least in theory under feudalism titles represent a feudal contract between a vassal and their overlord: so if you’re the Knight of Standfast, for example, you hold that land from House Rowan, who holds it from House Tyrell, who holds it from the King.

That fiefdom is (in theory) a grant from the liege lord that they can give or revoke technically at will. And even in a situation in which practically speaking a feudal system had moved from the Carolingian model in which fiefdoms were considered a grant for life only and then reverted back to the king to an inheritance model in which fiefdoms were considered to be the rightful property of the heir of the previous lord, there still were a lot of medieval ceremonies that took place when either a vassal or a liege lord died, in order to re-enact the agreement between vassal and overlord.

So what Aegon was doing was writing a bunch of feudal contracts, “giving” the lands in question back to his new vassals in return for their homage and an agreement about what kind of service they would give in return (which would include military service, taxation, etc.). And then when Aegon died and Aenys I was crowned, he would have received the homage of his subjects, and at that ceremony the feudal contract would have been renewed between the new king and his subjects.

Could the king rewrite those contracts and shift the land around? Sure, we’ve seen plenty of examples of it, from the Brackens and the Blackwoods lobbying the King to choose which of them gets various disputed lands, to Harrenhal handed out as a token of royal favor, to the creation of the New Gift and the founding of Summerhall. But it’s risky, because taking land from some to give to others creates a lot of angry people…just ask Raoul of Cambrai.

re: King Arthur/Garth Greenhand

I find the Arthur comparison to Garth Greenhand surprisingly apt. As you point out, GG exists as a number of different characters. With ASOIAF, I’m never sure what to do with Martin’s coy in-world-historical-skepticism, but I can imagine a Maester trying to tease apart the threads of the legend, and if you asked him: “was there a historical Garth Greenhand,” he might answer: “depends what you mean.”

GG is supposedly: the founder of House Gardener, the leader (or a leader) of the First Men, the father of a lot of other heroes, and a fertility god. The first three (and maybe the fourth!) are all things that definitely happened in Westerosi history – someone was the first Gardener, the First Men into Westeros surely had leaders, the great heroes had fathers (whether or not they were all the same man). From this much material you could spin out a thousand different guesses at a “historical” GG … you could even question whether any of them actually had to be named Garth.

Thus with Arthur. If there was anything like Geoffrey’s version – “King Arthur”, ruling much of Britain and fighting Saxons – then his absence from the historical record is astonishing. (But if you were going to lose a guy like that, 5th-6th c. Britain is where you’d do it.) The earlier references to Arthur present one of two themes: a warleader (not necessarily a king) fighting foreign enemies, or a culture hero akin to Finn McCool or Paul Bunyan. One is part of the historical narrative about Romano-British resistance to foreign incursions, and the other rides around the countryside lopping the heads off giants, sometimes being a giant himself, and having bits of landscape named after where his horse stopped for a drink.

Given that even the nature of the historical context in which Arthur-warleader is found is up for debate, “was there a real Arthur” is up for infinite re-definitions, most of which have to land on “maybe” for an answer. I only see two ways to get a “no” – one is to insist that anything short of Geoffrey doesn’t count, the other is to argue that Arthur was a purely fictional culture hero, who was eventually historicized and attached to a bare minimum of historical events but not to any one man’s deeds (because then you could say that he was the “real” Arthur). At the extreme you wind up with cranks doing bad history and worse linguistics telling you that the REAL Arthur was prince of some valley in Wales or Scotland, not named Arthur, and never fought anybody except other princes of valleys in Wales or Scotland, and ohmygod who cares.

But I still want to know: who was the historical Garth Greenhand?

Good question!

I guess I’d say that I see a couple key differences between Arthur and Garth Greenhand.

as far as we can see, there isn’t the same problem of non-contemporaneous sources – the legends of Garth Greenhand are really, really old and the Citadel has preserved runic records that go all the way back to the arrival of the First Men in Westeros, so we’re not relying on, say, post-Andal sources as we might have thought prior to WOIAF.
there’s a relative consistency about Garth. Man or God, pretty much all of the sources say Garth was one of the luminaries of the Age of Heroes, that he had the green clothing, the association to agriculture and fertility, that he was the father of kings and lords and heroes. Indeed, one of the things that I find most interesting that @goodqueenaly brought up is that there’s not even any debate about the birth order of Garth’s kids – no rival ever thought to argue that their ancestor was actually the oldest kid, and everyone seems to agree on who the main kids of the Greenhand were.
there’s an immediacy of the claims of descent. Again, as @goodqueenaly reminds us, it’s not like there weren’t royals who claimed descent from King Arthur, but we don’t really see that happening until almost a millenia after and those claims are pretty clearly modelled after Geoffrey of Monmouth and much later sources. But in House Gardener we have a case where we have heirs of Garth Greenhand from very early on – judging by regnal numbers, there must have been at least 23 generations of Gardeners before the arrival of the Andals.

So who was the historical Garth Greenhand? I’m not sure. Could be him:

Or him:

Or him:

Is the Wildlings being so under developed significantly due to culture, ie refusing to organize into larger polities and shunning wargs who could be useful in many ways such as hunting better? After all the Thenns have managed to have a sophisticated civilization despite living in the same environment and there was even hardhome. If say hardhome was never destroyed and both it and the thenns managed to expand to a greater degree and open up trade with northerners could they have managed to create a society capable of matching other planetos ones politically and technologically?

Man, people are really, really interested in economic development of a region that’s really not suited to economic development.

No, wildling underdevelopment is mostly not due to culture, but the fact that A. most wildlings lack very important technologies like agriculture and metal-working, and B. Beyond-the-Wall is an incredibly harsh natural environment that doesn’t allow for much in the way of surplus food – this forces most people to spend their time on acquiring the necessities of survival, makes specialization difficult if not impossible, etc.

Of the wildlings, really only the Thenns have managed to maintain the level of technology (bronze-working, subsistence agriculture) that the First Men had back in the Dawn Age, and I’m pretty sure that’s only because the Valley of the Thenns provides enough of a protection from winter storms to allow for crops to be planted and harvested.

Anon Asks:

Timeline question: How old was Aegon when Volantis was defeated during the bleeding years? It seems confusing since Argilic was said to have slain the king of the reach twenty years after it, Aegon would seem to have been only a boy at the time, since he was born less than three decades before he began his conquest of westeros, how do you make sense of this, could he really have participated at such an age or is this a case of the dates being wrong?

Good question! As one might expect, Volantis’ rise and fall in the Century of Blood was a somewhat drawn-out process. So here’s my best guess of how the timeline works out:

We know that the Doom of Valyria provoked “immediate political upheaval,” with revolutions in Tyosh, Lys (and presumably Myr) against the dragonlords. (This is a bit confusing since WOIAF tells us the Free Cities had bought their right to self-government from Valyria, but it’s possible that this right was somewhat honored in the breach, especially in a crisis, or that the Free Cities acted out of fear that their rights would be taken by the dragonlords in said crisis.)
We also know that the Volantenes “quickly laid claim to Valyria’s mantle,” which suggests that the war began pretty quickly after the Doom, so probably within a year or two of 114 BC.
We also know how long the ascendancy of Volantis lasted: “a Volantene fleet took Lys and a Volantene army captured Myr, and for two generations all three cities were ruled from within the Black Walls.” (ADWD) Given that a generation is roughly 30-35 years, that suggests that the Volantenes were successful in their expansionist offensive from around 114 to around 53-44 BC.
Then we learn of a whole bunch of stuff happening in quick succession: Volantis tries to conquer Tyrosh, Pentos joins the war on Tyrosh’s side, Lys and Myr rebel, Braavos finances Lysene resistance, and the Storm King defeats Volantene attempt to retake Myr. This lets us know roughly when Argilac was warring in the Disputed Lands – given his age (Argilac was born roughly 60 BC), and the fact that this campaign is the first campaign after his boyhood that’s mentioned in the text), but also comes after all of the previous events, it probably happened closer to 44 BC. This would place the Battle of Summerfield around 22 BC.
We then get a bunch of details that give us some hints as to when Aegon was involved. We learn for example that Aegon was “still-young,” that his intervention came “near the end” of the Century of the Blood, and that he joined the war at the behest of Pentos and Tyrosh (which places it definitely after their alliance). Now Aegon was definitely born in 27 BC, which means that he really couldn’t have partaken much before 13 BC – but this is only problematic if we get overly finicky about the “Century” part of the “Century of Blood.”
So Aegon gets involved very late in the war, burns “a Volantene fleet that was preparing to invade” Lys in what must have been a very last-ditch counter-offensive, and then Dagger Lake and the Dothraki show up and the elephants overthrow the tigers – which we know happened right around 0 AC, since Aegon VI describes the elephants as having “ruled the city for three hundred years” in the year 300 AC. This suggests that Aegon’s intervention must have happened only a few years before the Conquest, at most around 4 BC, when he was in his early 20s. (Which counts as still-young, I suppose.)
Moreover, we also learn that “shortly after his role in defeating Volantis it is written he lost all interest in the affairs of the east…’[and] turned his gaze west,” which are the last words in WOIAF before the account of the Conquest begins. This is further evidence that Aegon’s involvement must have happened only a few years before the Conquest.

As long as we’re willing to accept that the Century is more of a handy moniker than a precise chronological metric, the problem resolves itself nicely.

Anon Asks:

Why is slavery illegal in Westeros? We know that the northerners hate it. But why should it so hated as to demand execution?

Good question!

One quick correction: both northerners and southerners hate slavery; it’s one of those few true universal taboos in Westerosi culture, like kinslaying or guest-right or oath-breaking.

I do think there are different cultural reasons for the shared belief, however. In the case of the South, I think it’s a combination of the Seven’s “all souls are children of the Seven” kind of ideology and the memory of the Valyrian Empire and the need to flee Andalos to avoid being enslaved. In the case of the North, I think it’s a kind of deep ancestral memory of the White Walkers and their drive to turn all that lives into their zombie slave army.

Stannis’ arcs

Stannis’ arc from ACOK to ASOS was to become from the king Westeros deserved for its stupidity in the nobles to the king Westeros desperately needs in the face of the Winter-creatures.
Now sadly Stannis’ arc from ADWD to TWOW will be to realize that being King of Westeros =/= Hero of the World, even though he is fit to be and will horrifyingly prove it, only for it to be worthless. However, I thought about something, and I know GRRM said he would not end it in “Westeros became a wasteland, but Essos got lucky, the end” to paraphrase it, but I thought on how much horrifyingly fitting would it be if Stannis has to sacrifice not only his only child, but ALL WESTEROS (supposed someone would give him the means) to decide “Kill Westeros to keep humanity alive”, it would be an interesting choice from a dramatic literary viewpoint where, to keep the role of hero, he has to commit the worst crime possible from the viewpoint of his original position, the position from which he accepted Melisandre’s service in the first place, to help him being the king, initially caring nothing for the hero thing, except as a little booster of self-esteem. Your thoughts?

I don’t think scale is necessary for the “worst crime imaginable.” Rather, I would argue that it’s intimacy that acts as an intensifier, while sadly scale often de-sensitizes.

Hence my theory as to where Stannis is ending up.

Question

If Volantis was destroyed would that reroute traffic to slaver’s bay?

Probably not. Keep in mind, the economies of Essos are fairly specialized. In this case, the cities of Slaver’s Bay act as processors of the human raw materials that the Dothraki extract, and sell them to the Free Cities:

“For centuries Meereen and her sister cities Yunkai and Astapor had been the linchpins of the slave trade, the place where Dothraki khals and the corsairs of the Basilisk Isles sold their captives and the rest of the world came to buy.” (ADWD, Dany III)

Of the Free Cities, Volantis was their largest customer. Thus, Dany’s anti-slavery crusade has had two effects. First it’s terrified the slaveowners of Volantis into electing a tiger majority and going to war against free Meereen:

“The best calumnies are spiced with truth,” suggested Qavo, “but the girl’s true sin cannot be denied. This arrogant child has taken it upon herself to smash the slave trade, but that traffic was never confined to Slaver’s Bay. It was part of the sea of trade that spanned the world, and the dragon queen has clouded the water. Behind the Black Wall, lords of ancient blood sleep poorly, listening as their kitchen slaves sharpen their long knives. Slaves grow our food, clean our streets, teach our young. They guard our walls, row our galleys, fight our battles. And now when they look east, they see this young queen shining from afar, this breaker of chains. The Old Blood cannot suffer that. Poor men hate her too. Even the vilest beggar stands higher than a slave. This dragon queen would rob him of that consolation.” (ADWD, Tyrion VI)

The other effect that it’s had is to raise the price of slaves by massively cutting the supply. Hence why in ADWD, you see slavers being so greedy and reckless as to kidnap wildlings and try to sail through Braavosi waters, because the pure profit is worth the risk of being hanged.

Thus, if Dany attacks and captures Volantis, the economic effect will be to massively curtail the demand for slaves, by removing one of the biggest markets for slaves in all of Essos – because Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh aren’t big enough to pick up the excess. Which may be enough to break the slave system throughout Essos…

Ironborn and Thralldom

Hiya!! Great work on the newest Politics of the Seven Kingdoms as usual! One thing that I thought kinda went underplayed in your analysis of the Ironborn was the effects of thralldom on military development. Using Sparta, chattel slavery, or manoralism as examples, it seems like there would be a serious concern amongst “Old Way” adherents about thrall revolts, especially since their reaving drastically expands the population of thralls. This would mean that the next time they sail, they would leave more people behind to maintain their caste system which would in turn reduce the number of men they had available for reaving in a stagnating cycle unless some “New Way” king comes to power to clean up. Do you think this would help address some of the concerns regarding the Ironborn’s numbers? I often see it put up that thralldom would increase the Ironborn’s military strength, but honestly this seems backwards compared to a lot of historical examples, where these kinds of systems hamper military mobilization due to fear of revolts (which can be seen even as late as the terror of European aristocrats at the strength of Revolutionary France’s levee en masse). Even in universe, Braavos rapidly developed and seems to have achieved parity with the rather unstable slave societies of Valyria’s ancient colonies and has a glut of ship builders and bravos hanging around, while Volantis is paranoid about having enough guards to prevent a R’hllor led slave revolt. At a fundamental military level, it just doesn’t seem entirely suprising that the Ironborn’s biggest successes (apart from plot power) come from singular strikes after a New Way king reduces the thrall population (freeing up guards and increasing available population) and increases the number of available men closer to its 15000 man limit for Balon or Harwyn Hardhand.

I felt I’d addressed it enough via the Sparta comparisons, but this is a fair point. Generally speaking, keeping a large segment of your population bound to unfree labor means having to hold back a significant number of soldiers to keep them in place.

Just one of the many ways in which slavery warps slave societies.

Cast-amere and Cast-erly

Well… pretty much there was a theory on reddit that posited the Reynes as a bastard branch of the Casterlys, an idea whose link was included in the wonderful post of @joannalannister in her words for House Reyne. That was pretty much why I said it.

Also, when I spoke, I meant how Ellyn Reyne does resemble Barbrey Ryswell. Ellyn Reyne wanted to become a Lannister with much more intensity than anyone else recorded, like Barbrey and Theon wanted to be Starks above all.

Ah, I see. It’s a fine theory as it goes, the whole reversed arms thing, but the WOIAF I think is pretty strong evidence to the contrary. I’d also point out that we don’t know what the heraldry of the Casterlys was, and that if the connection was through the Casterlys, why would they have reversed the sigil of the Lannisters?

I don’t know if I would agree that Ellyn wanted to become a Lannister, exactly. She “had for years anticipated one day being the Lady of Casterly Rock,” and certainly pursued Tywald and Tion and even Tytos.

But Ellyn doesn’t show any of the signs of alienation from her original family that, say, Theon did. As “the Lady of Casterly Rock in all but name,” Ellyn made damn sure that House Reyne profited from her success with Tion. Hence “her brothers Roger and Reynard were ever at her side, and offices, honors, and lands were showered upon them, and upon her uncles, cousins, and nephews and nieces as well.” Likewise, when she was finally exiled from Casterly Rock, Ellyn promoted the fortunes of Houses Tarbeck and Reyne as much as she could, shaking down Tytos for as much gold as she could get, putting it in to Tarbeck Hall and its surrounding lands.

So I think of Ellyn as more self-possessed than Theon and less bitter than Barbrey. Which I think means that she didn’t necessarily want to be a Lannister, but rather wanted to be the Lady of Casterly Rock and the mother of the next Lord…regardless of whether this was as a Lannister or as a Reyne or as a Tarbeck.