Tag: the vale

Does House Arryn have any lands, either direct or through a vassal house, on the western side of the Mountains of the Moon (excluding the area west of Wickenden? I’m particularly interested in the region of the SW corner of the Bite? Various sources (Wiki, ridiculous WorldoIaF maps) indicate that it belongs to the Arryns, yet my common sense and the canon history of the region (pre-Conquest, through the Targ’s reign and the novels themselves) all point to this being near impossible. (1)Thoughts?

Continuation of my Q about the SW corner of the Bite: (2) If this region belonged to the Tullys, would it be a good location for a port town in the context of your Economic Development Plan for the Riverlands? (3) If it is House Arryn’s *cough!, would it be worth the trouble to get your hands on the lands?

1. I’m assuming you mean that strip of land along the coast immediately south of the Sisters, and not the part of the Riverlands along the kingsroad (which the Valemen tried to capture during the reign of Rolland II Arryn, who was defeated and later beheaded by Tristifer V Mudd). 

It’s a bit tricky, because that land doesn’t always exist, depending on the map. (Incidentally, the World of Ice and Fire map of the Vale is completely rubbish – somehow putting the Mountains of the Moon smack-dab on top of the Vale proper, to the east of the Bloody Gate) Some of the various book maps, for example, as well as Tear’s fan map (which GRRM endorsed pre-Lands of Ice and Fire), show the mountains coming up right to the coast as opposed to having this decent stretch of level ground.  

Now, I don’t think it’s that impossible for this land (if it exists) to Arryn rather than Tully – for one thing, it’s substantially to the east of the Mountains of the Moon, which seems to have been the historical boundary between the Riverlands and the Vale. It’s also really close to the Sisters and the northernmost Fingers, suggesting that historically those lands would have been in the orbit of either the Sunderlands or the Coldwaters or the Belmores or the Lynderlys or the Corbrays.

2. As a port…eh. It’s got a couple problems in that White Harbor and the Sisters are already-established competitors really close by, so you’re going to struggle to get off the ground. Exporting your goods into the Vale itself is going to either involve sailing all the way around the coast, in which case why not cut out the middleman and sell to Gulltown directly, or an incredibly expensive and risky mountain portage. If instead you want to export to the south or west, you’re going to run into some pretty steep rent-seeking from the Riverlords (especially the Freys if you want to access Seagard’s port), and it’s not really that much of a time saving compared to just going to White Harbor and taking the Kingsroad all the way down. 

3. It honestly depends on how productive these potentially non-existent lands are. The Riverlands aren’t exactly wanting for farmland, and they have easier ways to access the Narrow Sea through Maidenpool and Saltpans and the like. And it would be very hard to hang onto them, because they could be pretty easily cut off by a force landing from the Sisters. 

Why do you think the lords of the Vale arte so poor?!

I think there’s a couple reasons:

  1. there’s a sharp division between the lords of the Vale proper and the lords of the Fingers and the islands. The former have all the rich farmland and arable land of the valley, whereas the latter have less and poorer soil that’s much more mountainous. So there’s a lot of inequality within the nobility: consider the difference between Petyr Baelish’s father and the Royces of Runestone, for example.
  2. the lords of the Vale are traditionalists, even more than most. They don’t act in a profit-maximizing fashion, they concentrate on agriculture rather than trade (hence why Gulltown is so small), and they would never think of economic development (hence why the mineral resources of the mountains haven’t been tapped into as in the Westerlands).   
  3. when you get down to it, the Vale is not that big. It’s quite fertile, but it’s not as big as the Reach and it’s not going to grow any time soon. This means that the Vale can’t expand its economy easily just by bringing new land under the plow (because all the land that can be grown on already has been) or by increasing the number of hands in a field (because that threatens overpopulation). 

Steven Xue Asks: Do lords normally sell food right before winter?

I did a reread of the Alynne spoiler chapter and I find the way the lords of the Vale are trying to sell off their gain reserves and doing it so eagerly as lord Grafton says “the lords are eager to sell” very baffling because winter is fast approaching. I find this really bizarre because I’ve always been under the impression that before the 19th century, people had a tendency to stock up on food supplies before winter to ensure they had enough food to last the winter months.

In Westeros where winter can last for many years, I would have thought that right now the conservation of food would be considered a huge prerogative for both the nobility and the smallfolk (who should know that winter is just right around the corner). I suppose these lords are just trying to make a quick buck while the going is good, but even from a monetary standpoint it doesn’t make a lot of sense as Littlefinger points out that when winter is in full swing, he will then be able to sell their grain back to them at a higher rate.

With all this in mind I’m just wondering if it makes any sense at all for the lords of the Vale to be selling off their grain reserves right before winter and did this actually happen in real life? 

I would disagree with “winter is fast approaching.” Autumn may be lingering in the fields of the Vale, but Jaime has seen snow falling in the Riverlands, which means winter is here.  

And the lords of the Vale want to sell their food now because that’s what they (and the Reach) have historically done: exported their surplus so that the rest of Westeros can eat. While they’ll make a substantial profit due to higher prices – which is a significant source of their wealth and power – they wouldn’t dream of holding back supply from the market to maximize profit.

That would violate the honor code of noblesse oblige, their reciprocal obligation to their smallfolk. It would be precisely the kind of selfish and materialist action that marks one out as a merchant rather than a nobleman, who acts in a disinterested fashion. 

What Littlefinger is doing is known as “Engrossing, forestalling and regrating.” He’s withholding goods from market and buying up other supplies to resell later, with the intended purpose of raising prices. And historically, this kind of monopolistic behavior was considered highly illegal, because creating artificial scarcities threatened social disorder (bread riots). 

Vale Economic Development Plan

(For previous parts in the series, see here) 

And so the Seven Kingdoms Economic Development series comes to a close – I’ve been asked repeatedly to extend this by taking a look at Slaver’s Bay or the whole of Westeros or other things, and I might do so if I’m feeling it, but I’ve got some great projects coming up soon that will require my attention so that might be down the road a bit. 

The Vale’s an interesting case to end on – it’s got some good stuff to work with, but it seems like the Vale never quite lived up to its potential in part because of an excess of highborn conservatism has held it back. So let’s see what we can do to fix things…

“It stretched before them to the misty east, a tranquil land of rich black soil, wide slow-moving rivers, and hundreds of small lakes that shone like mirrors in the sun, protected on all sides by its sheltering peaks. Wheat and corn and barley grew high in its fields, and even in Highgarden the pumpkins were no larger nor the fruit any sweeter than here.”

One of the first strengths of the Vale that we need to tap into is agricultural productivity. While geography means that the Vale doesn’t produce as much in absolute terms as the Reach, the Vale significantly punches above its weight in terms of per-acre production. 

My recommendations here should now be quite familiar: a Northern-style agricultural revolution to increase the yield from existing farms, linked to a Reach-style sub-treasury, land bank, and marketing and purchasing cooperative. Together, these measures should mean that overall levels of production are up and generating the most possible wealth for the kingdom, while ensuring that our system of storehouses (going to make damned sure that a LOT of our storehouses are going to be located inside the Giant’s Lance – more on which in a bit) help the Vale survives the winters.

One new element (which I had intended to introduce during the Westerlands section but ran out of space, so assume that the Westerlands is also doing this) is terraced farming. This is especially crucial for the more mountainous northern half of the Vale – Strongsong, Heart’s Home, Snakewood, and Coldwater – which don’t have the broad plains of the Vale of Arryn proper, and which we can now add to the net-surplus part of our Kingdom. There’s going to be some social and military implications

“On the far side of the stoneworks, the mountains opened up suddenly upon a vista of green fields, blue sky, and snowcapped mountains that took her breath away. The Vale of Arryn bathed in the morning light.”

The second target for development is mining and manufacturing. Now, given that the Andals’ conquest depended in no small part on iron, I highly doubt that the only thing that can be harvested from the Mountains of the Moon is marble, and I’m not about to take the WOAIF’s map at its face value – especially when the map puts said Mountains in the middle of the Vale as opposed to its western border. So I would guess that there is a good bit of iron in them hills – and given the iconography of the Royces, I’m guessing there’s a good bit of tin and copper for bronze. 

Likewise, the Snakewood Forest, the many mountain streams, and the suitability of the terrain for sheep-herding, means that there’s opportunities for timber/lumber/woodworking, and wool cloth production as well. Now, the Vale is not going to out-compete the Stormlands, North, Reach, Westerlands, or the Iron Islands in any of these fields, but the idea is to diversify the Vale’s economy away from just exporting staple crops towards more value-added products, while boosting its exports to imports ratio. Also, while the Vale can’t match any of these other regions for volume of exports (and thus prices), its proximity to the Braavosi market (and thus lower transportation costs) will give it enough of an edge that it won’t get boxed out. 

“Nor did the Kings of the Mountain and Vale neglect their fleets. In Gulltown they possessed a fine and formidable natural harbor, and under the Arryns it grew into one of the foremost cities of the Seven Kingdoms. Though the Vale itself is famously fertile, it is small compared to the domains of other kings (and even some great lords), and the Mountains of the Moon are bleak, stony, and inhospitable. Trade is therefore of paramount importance to the rulers of the Vale, and the wiser of the Arryn kings always took care to protect it by building warships of their own.”

One of the great underutilized resources of the Vale is Gulltown, which given that it’s one of the oldest cities in Westeros, it’s incredibly close to Braavos and the other Free Cities, should not be as small as White Harbor. The fact that it isn’t suggests the prevailing noble prejudice against merchants and commerce in the Vale has held back the development of its only city.

Hopefully, by locating the headquarters of the Vale Sub-Treasury (as opposed to its actual storehouses), the Land Bank, and the marketing and purchasing cooperatives for agricultural, iron, timber, and wool-production in Gulltown, we can begin growing the city – building a larger merchant class, deepening capital markets, and expanding warehousing and long-shoring employment. 

Moreover, with the capital from the Land Bank and the cooperatives, we can begin to develop the Vale’s commerce by copying Braavos’ Arsenal and build a fleet of vessels that can do double service as a merchant marine and a larger Gulltown navy. The objective here should be to expand the rather modest Gulltown fleet to around 100 full-size ships, giving us some naval punch. 

Moreover, given House Arryn’s position as Warden of the East, we have more of a legal pretext to engage in pirate-hunting and seizing the Stepstones than the Greyjoys or Martells or Baratheons. Incidentally, we’re also going to want a naval outpost on the Sisters to keep that unruly place under our thumb, and promote trade with White Harbor while giving us more of a presence in the Bite should it ever come to war. 

Four-and-sixty knights had been invited to vie for places amongst Lord Robert Arryn’s  new Brotherhood of Winged Knights, and four­ and-sixty knights had come to tilt for the right to wear falcon’s wings upon their warhelms and guard their lord…

the eight victors would be expected to spend the next three years at Lord Robert’s side, as his own personal guard.

With the wealth of the land and the sea flooding into our coffers, it’s time to begin institution-building. The first thing we need to do is better knit together a Kingdom very much divided by mountain passes through a program of road-building – the High Road needs to be extended from the Eyrie in two directions, the first heading northeast to Ironoaks-Old Anchor-Longbow Hall, and the second southeast to Redfort-Gullotwn-Runestone. Next, we need to build another mountain road to connect Heart’ s Home, Strongsong, Snakewood, and Coldwater to the Vale proper, which would probably want to cross over the mountains at around Ironoaks or Longbow Hall, depending on which area has the easier pass. 

These roads will greatly improve transportation, and thus commerce and communications between the southern and northern halves of the Kingdom. However, as with the terraced farming and the expansion of industry, this is going to bring us into conflict with the mountain clans, who are a major barrier to the development of the Vale. Which unfortunately gets us into the area of economic development that hearkens back to ideas of primitive accumulation through expropriation. 

Thus – expanding on the idea of the Winged Knights from Alayne in TWOW, we would want to create an order of Knighthood much larger than just 8 men. Rather, I would look to a force of at least 700 knights (the top 7 of whom would be the bodyguard of the Lord of the Eyrie) whose task would be to hunt down the mountain clans and drive them out of the Vale, and thereafter to patrol the roads and maintain the peace in the Vale. Moreover, because I’ve been reading a lot about Byzantine cataphracts and how they combined the skills of the armored lancer and the compound recurve horse archer, I like the idea of using the Winged Knights as a military academy to train the knights of the Vale into an all-mounted army to be feared. 

Finally, the Eyrie – depending on whether the Eyrie actually does have secret paths down the mountain that would require a besieging army to spread itself across the base of the mountain, I’d put some money into building them so that it is much more difficult to stave out the Eyrie (then again, with much of the Vale’s agricultural produce being stored in the sub-treasury storehouses dug into the interior of the God’s Lance, it’s going to be very difficult to do so). Regardless, you’d definitely want to start building into the mountain, such that you can house and supply more men in Stone, Snow, and Sky (the latter two of which could use some improvements), move men between castles unseen, and if besieged, move men behind the besieging force to cut it off from its own supplies.