Can anyone who can trace descent from the noble families of old valyria go inside the black wall of volantis? Like if a targaryen, velaryon or rogare visits volantis would they automatically gain entrance, or would they still need an invitation?

Here’s how it works:

“…the Black Wall that had been raised by the Valyrians when Volantis was no more than an outpost of their empire: a great oval of fused stone two hundred feet high and so thick that six four-horse chariots could race around its top abreast, as they did each year to celebrate the founding of the city. Outlanders, foreigners, and freedmen were not allowed inside the Black Wall save at the invitation of those who dwelt within, scions of the Old Blood who could trace their ancestry back to Valyria itself.” (ADWD)

Emphasis mine. Even if you’re of the blood of Old Valyria, if you weren’t born within the Black Walls of Volantis, you need an invitation.

Greetings Maester Steven, In A Laboratory of Politics, Part V, you trace a parallel between the Volantene society and Byzantium, naming them both slave societies. Volantis is undoubtedly one, but what makes you call Byzantium a slave society rather than a society with slaves? Isn’t that parallel a bit exaggerated, given that slavery is far more widespread in Volantis than everywhere else in medieval Europe? As for the Byzantines, could you point me at some historiography regarding the matter?

Byzantine slavery was a direct outgrowth of Roman slavery, and Rome was undoubtedly a slave society, with anwhere between 4.6-19.3% of the population enslaved (see Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, 2011). Specifically on Byzantium, a huge, huge part of Byzantium’s Black Sea trade was in slaves, and Byzantium not merely acquired slaves by the tens and not hundreds of thousands at a time for use in a variety of industries at home, but also sold slaves widely across the Mediterranean, there were slave markets in many Byzantine towns and cities (the one in Constantinople was known as the “Valley of Lamentations”). So I think it counts.

For more on this, check out Youval Rotman’s Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (2009), and Hadjinicolaou-Marava’s’s Rercherches Sur La Vie Des Esclaves Dans Le Monde Byzantin (1950), which are both important monographs in their own right but should also provide some useful bibliography.

What do you think prompted the Triarchs of Volantis to permit the construction of a massive Temple of Rh’llor right outside the Black Walls and the creation of a religious militia wholly responsible to the priest of said temple? Even if the anti-slavery angle is a new one for the Red Priests, arming the Faithful like that seems like a very bad idea.

Well, as I said in my essay, Volantis is a particularly unstable slave society desperately trying to keep ahead of the ball, and that’s especially true with R’hllorism.

The problem with R’hllorism is A. it’s too popular to destroy (half their slave soldiers worship the Red God, so even a radical reactionary like Malaquo knows that he doesn’t have the internal resources to pull it off), B. it’s not their religion, so they can’t dominate the hierarchy and re-fashion practice or doctrine into pro-slavery messages, and C. it’s an institution that crosses too many boundaries of nation and caste to be cowed by the hegemony of the Old Blood of Volantis.

So consider their options? They say no to having the Temple built by the Black Walls – the High Priest has it built over in the Shadow City, and now it’s far less under their influence and a de-facto alternate government HQ. They say no to a religious militia – the High Priest tells the faithful that “all those who die fighting in [the] cause shall be reborn,” and now the Old Blood are fighting a religious civil war against the better part of five-sixths of their population, with an army whose loyalties they cannot trust.

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.

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…