Tag: Thralldom

Are all the men on ironborn longships freeborn fighters, or do you think some are thralls who solely row? We see Vic using such to Meereen with captured slaves he “freed”. And do you think all the regions were involved in Greyjoy’s Rebellion? If not, which ones weren’t? Did Jon presumably staying in KL mean the Vale wasn’t rallied? Did Doran not seek to build (fake) trust with the Iron Throne by sending levies? Did Mace only “provide” the Redwyne fleet? Did Hoster leave it to the Mallisters?

opinions-about-tiaras:

The ironborn definitely use thralls as rowers. They may or may not solely row, but they are certainly thralls.

From the Victarion preview chapter of TWOW:

The oarsmen were all big. One was a boy, one a brute, one a bastard’s
bastard. The Boy had been rowing for less than a year, the Brute for
twenty. They had names, but Victarion did not know them. One had come
from Lamentation, one from Sparrow Hawk, one from Spider Kiss. He could not be expected to know the names of every thrall who had ever pulled an oar in the Iron Fleet.


Victarion did not oft forgive a thrall for talking out of turn, but the
Boy was young, no more than twenty, and soon to die besides. 


If it made the three feel braver to believe they had a choice, let them
cling to that. Victarion cared little what they believed, they were only
thralls.

That strikes me as a case of the Ironborn social contract beginning to break down once you shift from the smaller-scale longships to actual warships, because otherwise the Ironborn very much separate out thrall’s work from freeborn work:

racefortheironthrone:

  1. I think that usually there’s a pretty strict code that there’s thrall’s work and Ironborn’s work and the two should not be mixed. Hence why Euron’s crew is an aberration.
  2. The Reach, the North, the Westerlands, the Riverlands, the Stormlands, and the Crownlands were definitely involved. We don’t hear anything about the Vale or Dorne tho. 

“Amongst the ironborn, only reaving and fishing were considered worthy work for free men. The endless stoop labor of farm and field was suitable only for thralls.” 

Incidentally, this also suggests that argument about the Ironborn having larger army #s are wrong, because if they have to resort to thralls to fill out the oars of a ship a third the size of mainlander warships, no way in hell they have 30,000 men under arms. 

Steven Xue Asks: Was Tywin really a slaver?

You have criticized Tywin on numerous occasions of “breaking one of the oldest Westerosi taboos” which is slavery. Now I hate to nitpick on this issue because I am no expert in this matter but isn’t what he did in Harrenhal a form of state bondage in a time of war rather than actual slavery? Weren’t the captives at Harrenhal technically POWs? And usually in any war, don’t captured prisoners (whether they are enemy soldiers or civilians) get conscripted into doing forced labor without pay and had few if any rights at all during their time of involuntary servitude? 

I don’t really see a distinction between “state bondage in a time of war” and “actual slavery,” I guess. At the end of the day, it’s still involuntary labor extracted through force and threat of force. 

POW status is usually reserved for enemy soldiers, not civilians, and the taking of large numbers of civilian prisoners is highly unusual. And there really is no precedent for this in previous Westerosi wars – we’ve seen attacks on civilian populations before, but we haven’t seen peasants kidnapped and forced into servitude before. 

The only thing that comes close is “Lord Lymond Hightower, the Sea Lion, who revived the practice of thralldom in Oldtown just long enough to set the ironmen captured during the battle to hard labor strengthening the city’s walls.” But even then, that’s enemy soldiers and temporary.