It solves some of the problems – a King Jon would probably not want to revenge himself on the Starks in the name of his father – but not all of them. For one thing, this doesn’t exactly do much for the Tullys, Baratheons, Arryns, and Lannisters, who don’t have the same protection of blood.
But there’s a larger political problem: the rebellion was launched as an argument that the actions of King Aerys and Prince Rhaegar were so contradictory to the feudal social contract that they had forfeited their right to rule. Naming Jon as King goes back on that in a really egregious fashion: by acknowledging Jon as Rhaegar’s heir, you’re accepting his abduction of Lyanna as legitimate, which the Baratheons are going to have a problem with. Moreover, as Rhaegar was Aerys’ heir, you’re accepting that Aerys was a rightful monarch.
Moreover, the Rebel Alliance had already acclaimed Robert as their King. So now Ned has forsworn his oath to Robert to put his nephew on the throne, which is going to be seen as both an unspeakable personal betrayal and dishonor for Ned and as rank self-interested treason in the eyes of the political class. Ned’s now going to have to deal with the Baratheons and the Arryns and Tullys who’ve sworn their oaths to Robert and his heirs, and he’s going to have to deal with the Lannisters who have every reason to fear a Targaryen restoration.
So the only scenario I see coming out of this is a bloody and entrenched civil war, likely leading to the fracturing of the realm as the Vale, Riverlands, and Stormlands declare for King Stannis, Dorne and possibly the Reach splits the Targaryen loyalist faction (because the Dornish are not going to recognize anyone of Lyanna’s line ahead of Elia’s), and the Westerlands and Iron Islands are all out for themselves.
And since Ned’s not an idiot, he’s going to see this coming the moment he finds out about Jon’s birth and that’s why he would never name Jon King.
It’s not entirely clear, but from context, the Lyseni Spring seems to have involved a popular uprising against the Rogare family in Lys and an elite coup against the Rogare family in Westeros, partially because of the overweening power of the Rogare family which threatened the oligarchical republic and partially because the Iron Bank does not like competition:
“In the end, it was Larra Rogare and her wealthy, ambitious family who helped break the power of the regents and, almost certainly, that of Lord Peake. It was an inadvertent role they played, however, caught up as they were in the Lyseni Spring. This was a time when the Rogare Bank waxed greater than the Iron Bank, and so fell prey to the plots to control the king; they were blamed for many more acts than they were actually guilty of. Lord Rowan, then the Hand and one of the last regents, was accused of being complicit in their crimes and was tortured for information. Ser Marston Waters, now somehow Hand of the King in his place (Munkun, the only regent at this time besides Rowan, is reticent to discuss this in the True Telling), dispatched men to seize Lady Larra after having arrested her brothers. But the king and his brother refused to give her up, and were besieged in Maegor’s Holdfast by Waters and his supporters for eighteen days. The conspiracy eventually unraveled as Ser Marston—perhaps recalling his duty—attempted to fulfill his king’s command to arrest those who had falsely implicated the Rogares and Lord Rowan. Waters himself was killed by his own sworn brother, Ser Mervyn Flowers, when he attempted to arrest him.
… the Lady Larra Rogare of Lys. She was a great beauty of Valyrian descent, and seven years the prince’s elder when she wed him at nine-and-ten. Her father, Lysandro Rogare, was the head of a wealthy banking family whose power waxed even greater following the alliance to the Targaryens. Lysandro assumed the style of First Magister for Life, and men spoke of him as Lysandro the Magnificent. But he and his brother Drazenko, the Prince Consort of Dorne, died within a day of one another, beginning the precipitous fall of the Rogares both in Lys and the Seven Kingdoms.
Lysandro’s heir, Lysaro, spent vast sums in pursuit of power and fell afoul of the other magisters, even as his siblings became embroiled in plots to control the Iron Throne. After his fall, Lysaro Rogare was scourged to death at the Temple of Trade by those he had wronged. His siblings received less fatal punishments, and one among them—Moredo Rogare, the soldier who carried the Valyrian sword Truth—eventually led an army against Lys.” (WOIAF)
So this reads a lot like the rebellion against Piero II Medici after the death of Lorenzo Il Magnifico, which led to the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, combined with a bit of the Pazzi Conspiracy, combined by some of the intrigues during the regency of Henry VI. However, there’s a lot of detail we’re missing here about how the Rogare tried to control the Iron Throne, what role the Peakes played in all this, what Marston Waters was about, and so on.
Hopefully when Fire and Blood Volume I comes out, we’ll get a fuller explanation of this incredibly complicated binational political event.
Nope. Renly’s campaign pitch was: A. the glamour and magnificence of his person and his court, and B. the size of his battalions, while trying to get everyone to forget about the larger implications of any of it.
As usual, Stannis puts it best:
“Good men and true will fight for Joffrey, wrongly believing him the true king. A northman might even say the same of Robb Stark. But these lords who flocked to my brother’s banners knew him for a usurper. They turned their backs on their rightful king for no better reason than dreams of power and glory, and I have marked them for what they are.”
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.
As I understand it, it’s similar to the difference between the first face of power (the coercive authority to achieve compliance) and the second and third (agenda-setting and hegemonic ideological power) faces of power. Namely, that a strong king’s authority is so secure that they don’t need to engage in displays of coercive authority because everyone already accepts them as the true source of legitimacy.
What he’s really talking about is Aerys. Aerys was paranoid and insecure, so he kept lashing out with displays meant to emphasize his kingship – burning people alive, having people’s tongues torn out, etc. The effect was the opposite, to make him seem like a weak, mad king who didn’t deserve to be on the Iron Throne.
Contrast Aerys to Jaehaerys I – a king so secure that he doesn’t need to make open displays of force to get what he wants. All he has to do is show up on a royal progress with all of his dragons and his force of personality and his expert administrators and people knuckle under because they already believe resistance is futile.
It was an imgur gallery that was deleted a while back and I had to recover it from the Wayback Machine.
Do you want me to send you some?
Please! I’m most interested in the Vale, the North, and Dorne.
I find myself often staring at the Vale map they made for almost an hour, trying to calculate how soil fertility, coastline and fishing availability could make House Royce, with their relatively small fiefdom, into one of the Arryn’s most powerful vassals. I know they can add the Tollets and Coldwaters to their incomes, but still I feel like there’s an inconsistency here.
Ok, keeping in mind that these are all guesses that some rando came up with (and the maps themselves could be better, looking at you map of the Vale with the Mountains of the Moon on top of the damn Vale of Arryn):
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 