Tag: white harbor

Why do you think House Manderly was able to build a thriving port on the mouth of the White Knife when all the other houses that held the Wolf’s Den ultimately failed to last?

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White Harbor was “built with the wealth that the Manderlys had brought with them from the Reach.” The previous occupants of the Wolf’s Den simply didn’t have the money to make the heavy up-front investments necessary to make the city secure (not only does White Harbor have the original Wolf’s Den and the much larger New Castle, but it also has city walls around both of those, and seawalls protecting the harbor, making it really, really hard to assault) and attractive to commerce (White Harbor might be small, but it’s got a double harbor with protective walls, jettys, a respectable shipbuilding industry, etc.)

Once those investments were made, they eventually more than paid for themselves, but it would have been hard for a lot of the smaller houses who held the Wolf’s Den after the Greystarks were brought down to make them in the first place. Moreover, the Manderlys had the advantage of making those investments at a time when the North wasn’t fighting wars against pirates and slavers on the one hand, and the Vale of Arryn on the other, so they had the opportunity to make their investments stick without seeing them burned to the ground. 

Why do you think it took the Manderlys to establish White Harbor at the mouth of the White Knife given its prime trading location? Do you see the North’s material existence or culture as particularly averse to founding permanent cities. Was it more of the fact that the area was (as detailed in WOIAF) highly contested between so many petty kings for so long? Historical contingency? Thanks for your reply.

Money, primarily. It’s not like the North didn’t use the mouth of the White Knife – the Wolf’s Den was fortified because that territory was useful to them. But the Manderlys had a depth of liquid capital that the less-fertile North simple didn’t have to hand, and because it was the only option, they invested all of it into a single location. This created the necessary labor demand for a proper city. 

But yes, the development of the Wolf’s Den was likely inhibited by the castle being the Vale’s focus of attack during the Worthless War and then suffering the effects of civil war and repeated change in management.