I think a couple different things would be necessary for a Riverlander King to become dominant:
economic/political/military development so that the Riverlands can bring its full potential to bear on its various challenges. If the Riverlands could raise 40-45,000 men as their population indicates they ought to be able to raise, or if their borders were better guarded by stronger castles, then they’d stand a much better chance against the Westermen, the Ironborn, the Valemen, the Reachermen, and the Stormlanders.
a stroke of geostrategic luck. Given the multi-front nature of the great game, it’s much easier for the Riverlands to do well if the Vale is fighting the North and/or the Westermen are fighting the Ironbron and/or the Stormlands/Dorne/Reach are all fighting eachother.
good leadership who can combine diplomatic and military talent to achieve one doable objective at a time. For example, if the Riverlands could work out deals with other kingdoms that would allow it to redistribute resources from one or two fronts, that would allow them to concentrate their resources in another direction. LIkewise, while absorbing the Crownlands is a reasonable goal, making a frontal assault on the Bloody Gate or picking simultaneous fights with all of its neighbors at once.
to act as a check on the Reach and the Stormlands – neither could “win” by permanently absorbing one of their neighbors because every time they focused their efforts in that direction, Dorne would hit them with raids that would either force them to pull back to keep what they had or weaken them to the point where they would be become too weak to hold on to what they’d grabbed.
to act as a scavenger in times of weakness – hence invading the Reach during the reign of Garth X or attacking the Stormlands repeatedly when the Stormlands are on their way down – although this isn’t unique to Dorne.
As part of that effort, I’ve decided to put together a GoogleSheets spreadsheet to construct as accurate a timeline as can be made. As you can see, it’s a bit threadbare atm, but it’s getting better.
And in the absence of a working multiple-recipient message function in Tumblr, I figured I’d make it an open invitation. @goodqueenaly, @warsofasoiaf, @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly, @joannalannister, @hiddenhistoryofwesteros, your help would be greatly appreciated; if you shoot me a message I’ll shoot you a editor’s link to the spreadsheet. Also, if I’ve forgotten anyone who would be good to ask or who would be interested in helping out, please let me know.
The pre-unification Faith of the Seven is a topic that I (and others) findto bea fascinatingmystery, because you would expect the Faith to be frequently involved in inter-regional conflict, either as an instigator or a mediator.
Instead, we have a very brief period where the Faith is used to inspire the Andals during their conquest of the Vale, and a little bit of the same in the Riverlands, but little thereafter.
This is strange, for a couple reasons. First, the Faith headquartered themselves in Oldtown, and far from remaining aloof from politics, almost immediately we see the first High Septon serving as the regent of Oldtown for twenty years. As I’ve said, this is going to have regional implications.
Second, the Faith established a standing military arm (the Warrior’s Sons and the Poor Fellows) and you don’t do that just to protect itinerant septons, escort pilgrims, and protect septs. You do that because you’re going to be fighting in wars.
However, we do get one example of the Faith involving themselves in the Great Game, which we can extrapolate from to work out a model of their political behavior. As we learn in the Riverlands chapter, the Faith Militant fought for King Humfrey Teague when the Blackwoods rose up against him and then when Arlan III Durrandon invaded the Riverlands to back them up.
So what can we learn from this?
The Faith of the Seven was active in the Great Game. While not a competitor in its own right because it lacked the equivalent of the Papal States, the Faith acted to promote some kings and, presumably, against others.
This activity extended to military intervention. This is something of a risk, because you can imagine a lot of monarchs who would get very nervous about allowing the Faith Militant to operate in their kingdoms if the Faith Militant was going to get involved in internal politics.
The Faith used their influence to shape religious policy specifically. Humfrey Teague didn’t get the Faith’s support just because he was a charming guy, he got it by building “many septs and motherhouses across the riverlands“ and by seeking to “repress the worship of the old gods within his realm.”
So where would we expect to see the Faith getting involved in the Great Game?
Well, I would be very surprised if the Faith wasn’t involved in persuading Andals to conquer the Iron Islands (given their bloody reputation on the mainland and their religious differences), or in calling for the punitive raid against Hagon the Heartless (both for his crimes against the Mother and the Shrike’s religious purge).
Likewise, I would expect the Faith to have been involved in prolonging the War Across the Water between the North and the Vale once the initial invasions of the North failed, as the best hope for continuing the fight against the pagans.
I could also imagine the Faith to try to use the Great Game to crack down on regional religious divides: are the septons in Sunspear getting a bit too “Rhoynish” for the High Septon’s tastes, or is the Most Devout of the Stormlands getting a bit too big for his britches? Well, a war can turn into a crusade very easily.
And I would definitely imagine that the Great Game would infiltrate into the Faith. Since the Most Devout elect the High Septon, I would imagine that the elections would become very much like the elections to the papacy during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Early modern period, where the various nations of Europe would vie to get their candidate on the papal throne as a way to extend their influence and thwart their rivals. Naturally, the Westerlands would have the most cash, the Reach would have the home field advantage, but there’s a lot of votes to be had from the Vale and the Stormlands and the Riverlands and Dorne, so I imagine the competition would get very complicated.
credit to ser-other-in-law Introduction: Last time, we saw how a succession of frighteningly single-minded and capable monarchs turned the Kingdom of the Reach from a petty kingdom ruled from a hillfort into a powerful and dynamic state that could reshape the map of southern Westeros and defeat its regional rivals singly and in combination. In this part, we shall see how this state confronted the…
Well, the Great Game is the term I use to describe “that long epoch between the assimilation of the Andals and the coming of the dragons” when the “Kings of the Reach
warred constantly with their neighbors in a perpetual struggle for land, power,
and glory. The Kings of the Rock, the Storm Kings, the many quarrelsome kings
of Dorne, and the Kings of the Rivers and Hills could all be counted amongst
their foes (and ofttimes amongst their allies as well.)”
In terms of what the countries wanted, the prize of the Great Game was the conquest of all of southern Westeros, or at least as much of southern Westeros as possible in the hopes of becoming a continental hegemon that could overawe those parts of Westeros it couldn’t conquer outright.
No one quite succeeded in that ambition, although many tried, in no small part because one of the rules of the Great Game is that the moment anyone looked to be winning, everyone else would gang up against them. Hence when the Reach had conquered all of the Stormlands save for Storm’s End itself, “the King of the Rock swept down upon the Reach in his absence, forcing him to lift his siege and hurry home to deal with the westermen. The broader war that followed involved three Dornish kings and two from the riverlands.” Likewise, when Arlan III conquered the Riverlands, “the Dornish came swarming over the Boneway to press them in the south, and the Kings of the Reach sent their knights forth from Highgarden to reclaim all that had been lost in the west,” and eventually the Ironborn took it off them. And just before Aegon landed, it looked like Harren the Black might be the next up for the dogpile.
The somewhat annoying thing about the Great Game, as I was just discussing with @goodqueenaly, is that we don’t have enough information from the sources to chart the whole 5,000 year period: we have a good bit of info about the early Great Game (from the Andal Conquest to the time of Lancel IV, Gyles III, and Torrence Teague), and we have a good bit of info about the late Great Game (from the time of Arlan III to Aegon’s Conquest), but the middle is very vague.
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.
Well, keep in mind that the Riverlands aren’t just a nexus point for the Stormlands and the Iron Islands – we know that that the Kings of the Rock “warred against the many kings of the Trident,” we know that “the lords of the Reach sent iron columns of knights across the Blackwater whenever it pleased them,” and we know two kings from the Riverlands invaded the Reach during the reign of Gyles III.
Dorne was another important nexus – hence the political importance of the marcher lords in both the Reach and the Stormlands and the fierce independence of the mountain lords of Dorne – both before and after the arrival of the Rhoynar. Dorne’s role was to force both the Reach and the Stormlands to keep an eye on their southern borders and to pounce on any sign of over-stretch or weakness: Garth VII had to be nimble as hell to fight the Fowler Kings and the Ironborn at the same time, but when Gyles III looked to conquer the Stormlands, three Dornish kings invaded him; likewise, when Arlan III conquered the Riverlands, the moment he died the Dornish launched invasions over the Boneway.
So I would argue there are several levels that the Great Game operated on: there’s the Riverlands nexus (which includes the Westerlands, the Stormlands, and occasionally the Reach and the Vale, and would later include the Iron Islands), the Westerlands/Reach nexus, the Reach/Stormlands nexus, and the Reach/Dorne/Stormlands nexus. And all of these nexii were going on at the same time, making for a very complicated conflict.
In terms of the importance of the Rhoynar, we don’t know enough – we get a sense that Nymeria’s uniting of Dorne allowed them to successfully hold off invasions by the Stormlands and the Reach, and we get a few accounts of invasions of the Reach and the Stormlands by the Dornish, but most of that is during the pre-Martell phase.
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