How powerful are the Mallisters? I mean, they hold the entire west coast of the riverlands and are bound to be the shield against the iron islands, so they should have some big fleet and also fast response cavalry in enough numbers to deal with any raids and invasions. Also, do you think Seagard is a trading port, cause i for sure wouldnt go trade there if i had to pass right through the ironborn to make any deal. How do you think that works for the people around Seagard and the Mallisters?

That’s a tough one.

We don’t have much in the way of hard textual evidence, and the Riverlands in general are really tricky because they underperform in power given their population and relative prosperity. What we know is that A. the Mallisters have a fleet of six longships and two war galleys (which is not a large fleet, but not a small one either), and B. were able to hold off the main force of the Ironborn during Greyjoy’s Rebellion.

I did an estimate in the past and said that I thought 4,000-5,000 was a reasonable figure. It’s not the most solid estimate I’ve ever done, for the reasons stated above, but I don’t think they’re particularly weaker than the Freys, given their geostrategic location, its economic advantages in trade (to the extent that the Freys are wealthy, most of their trade has to pass through Seagard), and the historical evidence.

As to Seagard itself. It definitely is a port – Theon sails to Pyke from Seagard on a merchant ship from Oldtown – although it’s definitely a port town at most. As for why it has trade despite the Ironborn presence, keep in mind Ironborn piracy has lapsed for long periods of time (several thousand years), and that the presence of pirates tends to presuppose trade since pirates don’t bother to sail where there’s no one to rob, because often geography means that ships have to sail through a given region no matter what. (Think about the real world example of huge amounts of shipping going through certain pirate-infamous locations like the Caribbean or the South China Sea or the Horn of Africa….)

In this case, if you’re going to trade from the North, the Vale, or the Riverlands to the Westerlands or from the Westerlands and even parts of the Reach to the same, it’s faster to go through Seagard and trans-ship down the Blue Fork or portage over to the Kingsroad and then over to White Harbor than to sail all the way around the continent or to take it overland. Not safer, but faster, and since time literally is money when you’re talking about transportation costs and their relationship to profit margins, a lot of folks will go with the faster option.

How come widowed Anya Waynwood is still in charge of Ironoaks and her son is still Ser Morton, not Lord Morton. I assume she was a Waynwood by birth, but it still seems like she would lose her status as ruler of Ironoaks as soon as Morton was of age, if her husband died before then. It means she was somehow the lord when her husband was alive, which I thought would be a huge no-no, especially in the stuck-up Vale, unless it was absolutely necessary.

It is an interesting question, and Lady Waynwood is not the only case like this – there’s Barbrey Dustin (albeit without an heir), Arwyn Oakheart (whose youngest son was Ser Arys), the Hornwood Crisis, Delonne Allyrion (who has an adult, and indeed married, son), Larra Blackmont (who has two I think adult children), and so on and so forth.

Trying to reconcile this with what we know of Westerosi succession laws is tricky. In some cases, I would guess that a lot of those situations are ones in which an heiress of a house continues to rule until her death (same as a male lord would do), whereas the widow of the previous lord would normally hand over the title to the lord’s heir (although, as we see with Lady Hornwood and Barbrey Dustin, there are widow’s use–rights in cases where there isn’t a clear heir.

How historically accurate are the prizes/penalties from the tournaments in GoT and Ko7K? They always seemed like they had a horrible Risk/Reward ratio to me to attract so many competitors. It would be like the NFL having several thousand teams, but only paid the one team that won the Superbowl, and any teams that lost in the first round of the playoffs would have to hand over their personal houses to the team that beat them.

Well, I’ve talked about the prizes recently.

But when it comes to the penalty, yes that’s accurate. Most tourney knights made their money off of ransoms and not prizes, since there were many more of the former than the latter in each tourney.

However, you have to keep in mind the class and class mentality of the participants involved. Tourneys were a pastime of the nobility, not that much different from hunts or feasts or dances, so it was expected that the combatants in a tourney were A. rich enough to be able to ransom themselves/their arms/horses and B. not supposed to be concerned about money.

To use your sports analogy, imagine if you had to be in the top 5% of incomes and wealth to play in the NFL at all.

So I had a thought on the Disputed Lands and slave labor. It seems weird to me that there are so many slaves proportionally in the Free Cities, so there has to be some kind of demand for them somewhere like a need for manual labor to farm large amounts, like the reason African slaves were brought to the Americas. This might be the real reason why the disputed lands are so fertile/how the Free Cities support such large populations. I just wanted to know if you thought that a plausible head cannon

You raise a good point. Slavery of the intense proportions seen in the Free Cities was only seen historically in single-export plantation economies. And yet, the Free Cities’ economies are overhwelmingly focused on commerce, finance, and the production of high value-added manufactured goods.

So vast latifundia in the Disputed Lands would provide at least a partial explanation for why you see such unusually high levels of slavery in the Free Cities. Not a complete explanation, but better than what we have now.

I don’t know if you’ve been asked this before, but can you buy or sell land in Westeros? Lady Ellyn Reyne and her husband Lord Tarbeck buy up land surrounding them. The Westerlings lost land over the years. Just how would that transaction work and would it be acknowledged by others as legal?

I’ve discussed this before, so I’ll just quote myself:

The Westerlings selling their land is a highly unusual event in Westeros – the only other times we hear about selling land is in the context of the Tarbecks forcing people to sell their land through threat of armed force, so voluntary (to the extent that the necessities of poverty qualify as voluntary) land sales are a sign that the feudal order is in crisis.

It suggests that the Westerlings were falling into genteel poverty, such that their rental income had fallen massively behind their ability to service their debt, and that they were having to surrender the collateral they had put up to secure the loan.

Legally, this could be quite tricky. In Medieval England, for example, the feudal principle of “Nulle terre sans seigneur” (no land without a lord) meant that selling land outright, known as “alienation of lands by will,” was actually legally impossible in the late 12th century. (The Magna Carta, for example, says that “No free man shall henceforth give or sell so much of his land as that out of the residue he may not sufficiently do to the lord of the fee the service which pertains to that fee.”) Selling land was legalized by the Statute of Quia Emptores in 1290, although the buyer was “required to assume all tax and feudal obligations of the original tenant,” so the land remained under the same lord as before. It wasn’t until the Tenures Abolition Act of 1660 that those feudal obligations were eliminated.

The TL,DR is this: normally you cannot buy and sell land freely in Westeros. The Westerlings selling land and the Tarbecks buying land suggests the feudal order breaking down somewhat in the Westerlands.

The maps in The World of Ice and Fire have little symbols for export industries – marble in the Vale, olives in Dorn, and so on. Sometimes these aren’t mentioned in the text, so do you think they’re consistent with the original books?

Sort of?

It’s a bit selective and kind of screwy – lumber is not the North’s only export, cattle aren’t only found in the Riverlands (and honestly the only big herds we hear about are in the Westerlands so…shrug), iron and tin are not found only in the Iron Islands, the gold mines of the Westerlands aren’t only in the north (Silverhill should have some mines near it, ffs), there’s no symbol for wine on the bloody Arbor, I don’t see how the Stormlands has much of an economy on amber, and given how often Dornish red is mentioned, you’d think they’d put it on the maps…

To raise a personal bone of contention: Vale map is completely screwed up, putting the Mountains of the Moon east rather than west of the Eyrie, basically smack-dab on top of the Vale which is a huge agricultural region. And there’s a bit of weirdness with the Vale exporting marble but for some reason the Eyrie is built from Tarth marble.

But I don’t see anything that’s blatantly contradicted by the books.

Different anon, but in regards to Lannister and the gold market, how likely is it that they insisted upon ALL taxes being paid in gold from at least the bannermen with mines if not all of their principal houses, while most other Kings/overlords were fine with whatever combination of precious metals, food, timber, etc… their subjects could provide.

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

Almost certainly, yes.

This seems like it would produce a lot of… I think economic velocity is there term?

Like, if their bannermen need to pay taxes in gold, they’re going to concentrate on either mining it (which is going to require paying workers or letting them keep a share of it or something) or on producing things they can then sell for gold to pay their taxes.

The Lannisters, in turn, cannot eat gold or sleep on it or make armor or swords out of it or whatnot. They’re going to turn around and immediately spend a lot of that gold on stuff that isn’t gold, pumping it right back into the economy they just extracted it from and once again encouraging people to accept payment for things in currency rather than in kind.

Absolutely agree. I would imagine, therefore, that the economy of the Westerlands is more economically “advanced” than a lot of its neighbors, in several ways:

You’d see much less barter and trading “in kind” and almost all transactions are made in currency (not getting into bills of exchange just for the sake of clarity). Even without a Golden Bank, I would expect to see more in the way of a financial sector, with goldsmiths and merchants acting as moneylenders using gold stocks as reserves for loans.

In the Riverlands or the Reach, where the most common thing you have to exchange is agricultural products, I imagine you’d see the reverse, where there’s more barter and trade in kind and fewer transactions in currency – and a lot more of the phenomenon where prices in currency change rapidly during times of crisis when people’s liquidity preferences would change b/c you can’t eat gold.

You’d see mining, processing (smelting), and smithing of gold and silver as a much bigger percentage of the economy (I talk about Westerlands guilds here), and correspondingly a lower percentage of the economy working in agriculture. That’s not to say that there’s no farming in the Westerlands – those vast herds of cattle Robb’s army rustled were tended by someone, and Cornfield clearly suggests that the southern Westerlands grows a fair bit of cereal crops – or that agricultural workers aren’t in the majority, but I might expect to see 75-80% as opposed to 90% everywhere else.

In turn, this would suggest that the Westerlands might have a higher rate of urbanization per capita than the Reach, even though the Reach would have a higher absolute number of towns.

Moreover, I imagine there’s a good bit of interregional trade between the Westerlands and its immediate neighbors – the West has the gold, the Reach and the Riverlands have the food, it makes sense. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of wars between these three regions have broken out over changing terms of trade, if one side gets too greedy or decides that it would like to horizontally integrate instead of trade.
And finally, we have textual evidence from WOIAF that there’s a lot of international trade from a very early period. This might explain why Lannisport is such a big city despite being on the wrong coast, because the gold was such a lure to foreign traders that they were willing to sail west across the Summer Sea, and then the city grew to serve foreign trade. It sort of reminds me a little of the trade imbalances between Europe and China in the 18th and 19th century, but in reverse, where the Westerlands has the gold and Essos has the manufactured goods and luxury items and so Essos gets the hard currency it needs to have a large banking sector.

(And velocity is exactly the right term…)

Historically, how (if at all) did House Lannister control the flow of gold and silver from their vassal’s mines/vaults into the Westerosi and wider Essosi markets? We know that controlling the availability of these precious metals is of paramount importance, yet given the environment the story plays out in, could this even be done? Have these methods changed since the unification of the Seven Kingdoms under House Targaryen? – Thank You, RSAfan.

Good question!

Well, to a large extent, the Lannisters can pull a De Beers: since they have the largest supply, they can set the price by restricting or loosening the flow from their own vaults.

Now, in IRL, gold mines required royal licenses. Given that different Houses have their own mines in the Westerlands, it doesn’t seem to have been the case that House Lannister had that kind of system. (Maybe the De Beers technique was good enough that they didn’t have to?)

Someone may have already asked this, but who would come out ahead if every kingdom tried to implement your Economic Development Plans more or less at the same time? Is it just a case of the-rich-get-richer where the Reach and the Westerlands ride their advantages to economic supremacy, or do the poorer kingdoms (the North, Dorne, the Stormlands) have some hope of catching up?

Discussed somewhat here and here.

It’s not just the case that the rich-get-richer; economic development can rapidly shift who’s rich and who’s not both inter- and intra-regionally: look at how England shifted from a relatively poor nation into the economic and financial powerhouse of Europe due to the commercial and industrial revolutions, or how the economic balance of power within the U.S has shifted over time (the Industrial Belt becomes the Rust Belt, the South moves from the “Nation’s #1 economic problem” to the Sunbelt, the factory towns of New England that have become hollowed out when the factories moved away).

My thinking is that the winners and losers have a lot to do with two main factors: timing and advantage:

When it comes to commercial infrastructure, getting there first gives a given region a huge head-start over their rivals, as was seen historically with the Erie Canal putting New York ahead of Pennsylvania and Virginia when it came to capturing the new east-west trade with the Midwest.
It also matters, on an industry-by-industry basis, whether a given region has an absolute or comparative advantage in that industry. So for example, the North is going to be very difficult to beat in the wool and woolen garment trade once it captures the higher valued-added segments of the industry, because it has such a large amount of land that’s suited to pasturage. Yes, the Reach is large, but you’d be giving up a lot of agricultural productivity by shifting over from cereal crops, fruits and veg, and dairy farming to sheep, so that raises the opportunity cost of investing in that industry. (On the other hand, the Reach might have lower opportunity costs when it came to linens or cotton.) Likewise, the Westerlands are probably going to be hard to beat when it comes to finance or metallurgy.

How fertile is the Vale?

You may have already covered this, but I wonder exactly how fertile is the Vale? According to the wiki: “The Vale proper is a tranquil land of wide rivers, and hundreds of lakes. Wheat, corn, barley, pumpkins, and fruit grow in its fertile soil.”

By all accounts the Vale seems to be more bountiful than the North and probably the Westerlands. Yet for some reason the Vale can only muster about 30,000 or more soldiers at its peak, which is on par with the North.

I find this a bit peculiar because though the Vale proper cannot compete with the Reach and Riverlands in producing as much food (according to your estimates the Riverlands could boast an army of 80,000 at its full potential), surely it should still be able to sustain a larger population than the North and therefore be able to raise more troops.

I’ve discussed this here. The issue you’re missing here is one of size; the Vale proper is quite fertile (“a tranquil land of rich black soil…even in Highgarden the pumpkins were no larger nor the fruit any sweeter than here”), but it’s not very large compared to other regions of Westeros (”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.”)

Take a look at the map:

That blue circle is the Vale proper; the rest of the Vale is all mountains. That little triangle is just about the size of the Trident, far smaller than the Riverlands or the Westerlands as a whole, let alone the huge expanses of the North or the Reach. So while the Vale is quite fertile on a per-acre basis, and far more so than the North, the North has so much more land than the Vale that it evens out.

(Incidentally, I said the Riverlands at full strength ought to be able to raise 40,000, not 80,000 men).