An episode with a lot of sisters.
Sisterly episode. The Three sisters to start
meaning the islands north of the Vale and South of White Harbor.
And the Two Sisters meaning Aegon's Queens, Rainies and
Vicenya, Mighty though they are in war, and we'll see some more
of that along with their brother.
But today it's time to to see how they are as rulers, at least
at the start of the of the post conquest era.
That's another way to look at this one.
Three Sisters and three heads of the dragon.
Before the 1st Dornish War began, there was 3:00-ish years
in which the only conflicts were small and isolated, IE most of
Westeros was at peace and adjusting to this brave new
world of of of world ruled by Targaryens, Aegon and his
sisters. The Dragon's interim, we're
calling it simply because everything in fire and blood in
this section is called the Dragon's something or other.
The Dragon's reign, the Dragon's peace, the Dragon's wars.
So why not the Dragon's interim? The Conquest was almost easy, as
you probably recall, at least in terms of the battles, and in
many ways those who had not fought back would be the hardest
to deal with, even though many if not most of those opposed to
the Iron Throne had been turned to ash.
Literally in many cases, the difficulties of ruling A realm
that has never been ruled as one or nearly one, we should say
this is all untrodden ground. It's it never been done before.
It's not a simple matter of just killing all your enemies,
although Aegon had proven pretty expert at that.
It's not exactly a way to rule a realm.
It's a good way to get in charge, but you have to manage
what comes after that. Many of the greatest real world
conquerors were not particularly skilled at the post conquest
stuff. So this is the brief time where
Aegon, Visenia, and Rainey's began to prove that they were
more than just dragon riders, while making sure to continue to
remind people that they were dragon riders.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. Hello and welcome everybody.
We're back with another episode. This is the first recorded
episode of 2024. It's not the first episode that
we drop in 2024, but the first one that's live recording during
this new year. So we're excited to start
another year of excellent fun delving deep into Westeros,
Essos and all of George R Martin's creations.
When we do live streams on Sunday, they're at 3:00 Eastern.
That's when most of our live streams occur afterwards.
Every video is on YouTube and Spotify, and every episode is an
audio only form available anywhere you find podcasts.
And it's ad free if you listen on Patreon or if you subscribe
through Spotify. A lot of the episodes can be
found with ad free versions as well.
Now our topics Moot is coming. Speaking of Patreon, it's going
to run through the end of January the 28th it starts, and
through the 23rd of February. We'll be choosing 12 topics that
will get made this year and we expect this to be a yearly
thing. So if you're hearing this in the
future sometime beyond 2024, well be on the lookout for this
current year's topics Moot. Whatever year you're hearing
this, we expect it to be a fun recurring thing.
Sean, how you doing today? Welcome to 2024.
We didn't have you in our last episode, so it's been a little
while. And how's it going?
I feel like we're already in the future 2024.
I mean that's something that we would make up as a a future date
to. For off. 2010.
Yeah, 2. 1024. I think this was the year that
something big happened in one of the movies. 20.
I know like last year it was like or the year before it was
like the year that Back to the Future two like came true or
whatever. I forget what movie it was this
year. There's a big one that's like
2024. Something happened, like maybe
one of the Star Trek. Oh, I think it was Star Trek 2
or Star Trek three. One of those.
Yeah, With the whales. Yeah, I think that.
I think they referred to 2024 and that one.
So, yeah, that's that's one way to feel older is to achieve the
year in a movie that they thought was like, so far-flung
like, oh, that's so far in the future.
People, people won't even be be aware of this movie by then.
Well, they were wrong about that.
What are you drinking? Today I've got a mixed.
It's starting to become standard now.
I've got the green Naked drink, the bolthouse protein drink, the
pineapple, coconut, sparkling ice and magic mine.
All. Stirred together, it's kind of
creamy. It looks like it has layers.
There's like 3 or 4 distinct shades of green in that
beverage. Shades of green.
Cool band name, yeah. That's right, it's not easy
being shades of green. So shout out to our good friend
Nina, Good queen allie.tumblr.com.
Her notes are in this episode, as you might suspect, because
they're in almost every episode. Her latest blog post, Witch pre
slash post Conquest events and in series events would be
popular plays slash operas in either of the Seven Kingdoms or
Essos. It's not a a thing that's wildly
or deeply delved into in the books, though it certainly comes
up especially in Bravos, what kind of plays and you know stage
productions happen. Obviously there's the puppet
show in the Hedge Night, so that's something, but there's
there's room to imagine a lot more like which historical
events would be done and how they'd be performed.
So it's a fun little rabbit hole of of imagining and topics, and
Nina writes a good several paragraphs on on on some stuff
here that I find very insightful and some good choices, so check
that out if you are so inclined. I really like that thought.
I never thought about it before. But just like, you know, nobles,
European nobles would have artists.
You know, Caravaggio, whoever they want to see paintings of
scenes from the Bible. You can imagine, you know, some
king would have wanted to see scenes from the.
Yeah, yeah, right. Or or some ancient stuff.
I mean, and Westeros has such a long history.
And Essos too, like that's something that's like weird to
compare to the real world. Like there's they almost have
more material in some ways. Yeah.
So questions, if you have them, certainly you can send them live
if you're here during the live stream.
And you can always send them to westeroshistory@gmail.com or
interact with us on one of the many social media platforms.
We're pretty much everywhere these days.
If you're on a social media platform, search for Westeros
history and you'll probably find us.
And at the end of this episode, I'll mention some other topics
that exist as episodes that we've made in the past that
relate to things that we discussed in this one, as well
as the answer to this trivia question.
Whose idea was it to form the office of Grand Maester?
Bonus if you can name the year it was created.
The answers to both halves of that question are in this
episode, if you didn't know it already, but if you don't, I'll
tell you at the end. So this is the beginning of the
post conquest era, with such topics as what I described for
this one in the beginning. Plus marriages, questions of
succession, ruling policies, other changes to the realm.
Then the first Ornish war, which is arguably a lot more
interesting than the conquest itself, because it was actually
a challenge and the mysterious ending to it.
That via letter that upset and confused both Aegon and the
fandom. Which we're we're, we're really
interested in that. We don't have, of course, the
answer to that mystery, but we have some great guesses and we'd
love to delve into that. So that's coming fairly soon.
And of course, the rest of the Conqueror's reign, longer looks
at Bissenia and Raines, the Red Keep, the birth of Anies and
Megor. We got a lot of fun stuff for
this portion of Val Arboretas, and then we'll get back to some
of our other topics where we've decided to delve into Valaritis
in chunks. Some of you asked for us to keep
it all at once, but we've realized that it's better to
jump around. We might be doing it for three
years if we try to do it. It's it's also fun because just
the way this fandom is presented, like the material
that were given by George and by the TV shows, that's how they
all work. They all jump around like you.
You never stay with one character for very long.
So I think it makes sense for us to do a similar thing, although
we'll stay in one place longer than the books and shows do.
We'll jump around a little more often than we did in prior Valar
Reed. I see what I did there, reread I
yeah. So we'll start with the Three
Sisters. This actually is a little bit
forward in the timeline, but only a little bit.
It happens during this interim period of the year one through
4, but it's more like the year end of the year 1 or beginning
of the year 2. But some of these things aren't
specifically dated. So anyway, let's start with the
Three Sisters quote. In The Bite, the Lords of the
Three Sisters had taken advantage of the chaos of Agons
conquest to declare themselves a free nation and Crown Lady Marla
of House Sunderland, their Queen.
As the air and fleet had largely been destroyed during the
conquest. The King commanded his Warden of
the North, Torin Stark of Winterfell to end the sister
men's rebellion, and a northern army departed from White Harbor
on a fleet of hired Bravosi galleys under the command of SER
Warwick Manderly. The hired Bravosi galleys are a
bit of a clue here as to maybe why the sisters thought they
could pull this off. Although to be honest, it's a
little crazy. And it it's explain, it's sort
of you get the idea that this was unusual because of how few
other places did anything like this.
They knew better than to try to think they could defeat the
Dragons even with or without a Navy to threaten them.
And the reason they may have thought a Navy wasn't around to
threaten them was because the Gull Town Navy smashed the
Valerian fleet and then was in turn incinerated by Vicenia.
So there wasn't a lot of available navies on the East
Coast. There was no Royal fleet at this
point. It was effectively the Valarian
fleet was the royal fleet, and that, like I said, it just been
torched and and surely wasn't rebuilt to any degree that it
would eventually become, say, during the Dance of the Dragons
when it was at its peak. So this was gotten started once
the conquest was beginning, once the Veil was focused on itself,
as in we're worried about what the Dragons are going to come do
to us. We're worried about Aegon and
his sisters. So that's when the sisters are
like, Oh well, our Liege Lord is distracted, The realm is at war,
Let's make our move. So Torin had to March home after
kneeling from kneeling to Aegon at Harrenhal.
And then he received this order, presumably his first order from
the king that was of any significance.
And this wouldn't have been quick, right?
He had to call up a fresh army. Presumably all that army had
gone home, the one he marched southwest.
A lot of them would just have to turn back around and be like,
hey, we were just in the field six months ago or three months
ago, now it's time to go back again.
And that is difficult. And of course, the hiring of a
fleet couldn't have happened overnight.
They have to go to Braavos and negotiate and get the ships
outfitted. None of this is quick,
basically. And it's not necessarily
something that shows approval by the Bravosi government because
this is Bravos. They're supposed to be against
Dragons and Valyrians and stuff. So the fact that they worked
with Aegon, it shouldn't be taken too deeply because these
are cell sales, they're not idealist, these aren't Bravosi
government ships, right. So yeah.
And I think, Sean, you had another take on this too as
well. Like, there's just the basics of
you know, peace is good for everyone, right?
Yeah, these sail ships might have wanted there to be peace as
much as anyone, you know, I, I depending on what the nature of
them were, you know, I guess if they are all just hired hands,
maybe they're just looking for any kind of battle.
But I can imagine that they might prefer for things to be
settled in Westeros, even if it just means that normal shipping
lanes go back to where they were so they can attack them like
pirates, you know, like they just said they'd rather
stability, they'd rather the status quo.
But it does show, I think. Nina pointed out that it shows
that Aegon had enough wherewithal to contact and pay
the ships. Like there's he was getting an
amount of stability already. Yeah, you know, I think.
Technically, the Manderleys hired the cell sales, but
regardless, it's still they did it under Aegon's order, so it's
still a similar thing. It's still he's still the guy in
charge, and we can't take this too far.
Bravos, of course, has problems with Dragons, and that might's a
big deal with maybe what's happening in the Song of Ice and
Fire. But this isn't Valyria.
It's not like Aegon was threatening to start a new
Valyria. There's no slavery, which was
the main issue for Braavos and, well, you know, so it's hard to
say that they would of course always be against anything the
Dragons are doing, and there'll be plenty of times when they
work together in the future. So it's not quite that simple,
as they're always opposed. I had one other quick thought
that the the sisters might not necessarily have thought they
could beat the Dragons. We've talked about this before.
Even if the Dragons can't come to their island and burn
everything up, OK, but you still need to have some human bodies
to occupy the lamp, right? And the Navy just got destroyed,
right? And also, Aegon doesn't seem
like he wants to kill everyone. He wants to be ruling them.
It might have been a a few factors made them think they
might get away with. It's like maybe they're not big
enough to matter to Aegon. I I don't think they really
thought they could beat the Dragons.
I think they thought they might get away with it because they're
not a threat. Because Akon doesn't want to
just kill them all. He wants to rule them and
there's no ships to come take over.
I I don't think it's completely crazy what they were doing here.
Yeah, and and there seems to be some sort of game, and I say
game in the term of Game of Thrones because there's some
very odd decisions made here, some some unusual things that
happen. Basically.
Why is the sister Marla Sunderland?
Why is she the Queen when it turns out she has a brother?
And, you know, normally in Westeros the the men come first.
So something's odd about that. Not that it's a bad thing, but
it it, it's kind of like was did they install her as a puppet
ruler? Did they make her like a front
to take the fall, 'cause that is kind of what happened.
She does kind of end up taking the fall.
Now that's one scenario. Another scenario is that she's
very ambitious and she takes a position that her brother
wouldn't have taken because he thinks it's insane to try this.
That's another possibly like a Cersei, sort of, Maybe not.
Maybe not as like cruel and paranoid as a Cersei, but
ambitious and and aiming to climb the ladder in any way
possible and maybe not great at forethought.
That kind of that kind of attitude.
Maybe she was a great leader. Maybe she had proved herself.
Maybe her brother was a crappy leader and had already been put
to the side. You know, we don't get a lot of
details from this and it does seem on a surface like the easy
answer. Maybe if she was just a puppet,
like just an excuse for the other leaders to test and see if
this works, and if not, she can be the scapegoat later on.
But maybe she had more agency than that.
Maybe. Maybe there is.
I can imagine. I can imagine a A2 season series
about this whole event, you know?
Yeah. It would be pretty neat.
There's a lot of great parallels.
Intrigue and character development could come from it.
So there's another interesting thing to consider here is the
time of of year, or the season. Rather.
Time of year doesn't mean the same thing in Westeros as far as
the seasons go. I mean that it was autumn around
this time, and autumn is a bad time, right?
Autumn is stormy season. So even if they thought that
ships could be procured for by their enemies, they might get
lucky and the storms might drive them back or make it difficult
for them to invade. And of course they Revere storms
in the sisters that's it's kind of the opposite of the ironborn.
The Ironborn think the the storm God is the the Satan basically
their equivalent whereas the on the sisters it's like the storms
bring them stuff because they're wreckers and they they plunder
shipwrecks and it's it's a boon to them.
So it used to be a place of piracy and wrecking.
Now it's more a place of smuggling and fishing.
The piracy is it's difficult to be pirates in an area where
there's lots of you know up and up sailing and and militaries
unlike on the Dragons. Yeah, not to mention Dragons.
Now on the West Coast, it's a little more easy.
There's there's fewer navies and Ironborn are stronger.
Their culture is more about warriors than about these other
forms of crimes that the sister men are known for perpetrating.
And you can see the value immediately of House Manderly
and White Harbor to the North. I mean, this wasn't part of the
North even, you know, 600 to 1000 years earlier.
So if we imagine some odd scenario where the Targaryens or
someone had conquered Westeros much earlier and the sisters had
a rebellion, he wouldn't have been ordering the Northmen to do
something about it because they wouldn't have been equipped to
do it all like, well, how are we going to get there?
You know what? We we don't have ships.
What do you mean, we're the North.
We haven't had ships since Brandon the Burner or Brandon,
Brandon the Shipwright or what have you.
And that was who knows how long ago.
So it's interesting to see also the way the authority trickles
down here is the Aegon commands Torin to get this done.
Torin then commands White Harbor to do it.
It's like, all right, Aegon passed down the command, but I'm
I'm passing that off to you. I don't think Torin did anything
personally other than pass this command on.
So that's goes to show a few things in terms of how these
things work when the the warden system is activated, which I
guess that was the first time the warden system was activated
and it worked pretty well and that's makes a lot of sense to
this. To this day, the sisters
operates mostly independently, so that's maybe part of why they
were of that mind that they could pull this off.
What if the Manderleys already had a Navy, you know, would they
have done anything differently? Would they have not hired
Bravosi or? I don't know.
I mean, ships are very vulnerable to Dragons, so it
might not have made that much difference in terms of how the
war actually went. In fact, it wasn't really a war.
I mean they once they saw, they gave up pretty quickly.
Once they saw that, their delaying tactics or the storms
or all that didn't work. Secondly, a much farther back,
what if the Manderleys constantly remind themselves of
their own past and their past was in the reach?
So the Manderleys would have otherwise been on the field of
fire during the conquest. They're like, that's where we
would have been. We would have been baked like
everybody else. Remember the the Order of the
Green Hand was entirely wiped out, except for amongst them
they are now the only ones left. And they still to this day
consider themselves members of the Order of the Green Hand.
So their rough equivalent in power was House Peak.
You know it was the Tyrell. I mean not the Tyrells, but the
gardener's at the top. And then kind of a few other
houses like Peak and Oakhart and these guys.
The the Manderleys were about as high as it was, so they would
have probably been near the front.
And since the house peak suffered nearly as badly as the
gardeners, then the Manderleys probably would have gotten
cooked just as badly. So this would have been maybe a
time when they gave thanks for their change of locale and yet
more thanks to the Starks, who they Revere for allowing them to
join their Kingdom. To this day, of course, we saw
Wyman Manderle preach it to Davos and to Robert Glover about
how much they regard the Starks and how important it is to them,
to their history and to the fact that they even existed this day.
If they're memorializing that now, then they probably
memorialized it 300 years ago when it was when it really
mattered, when things that would have shown them, you know, would
have changed their outlook dramatically.
So good job there. Now I wonder how eager or not
eager the order of the Green Hand was.
The show itself is like where they're like, I don't know if we
want to be seen or maybe we're like we're the proud few left.
I mean it could go either way, right, Sean?
Like that's that's a tough one to to guess at, huh?
I could see a scenario where they might be looked at as
cowardly for not having been there with the rest, but I don't
know. I'd rather be a coward and be
alive and and and they have the chance to go prove their
bravery. Right now they've got a chance
to go into this next battle, you know, So I I don't show me the
person who's not a coward when a dragon is breathing fire at
them, right? Often those are dead people that
you show are shown there, yeah. But I guess maybe they there
could be the a fear that you know that they fought against
the Targaryens and so maybe they're scared the Targaryens
want revenge or something. I still don't.
I don't think that's the case though because it's not like the
Targaryens were set out to get the Order of the Green Hand.
They're trying to win this battle that the Order happened
to be at. And so yeah, I think I would be
on the proud to still be part of it side and and the Targs might
be happy for that too that there's one more faction they
can say lay claim to as an ally you know.
That's true, and it's not like there was some bitter long term
struggle between the Order of the Green Hand and the
Targaryens. They just took the battlefield
at one time, got wiped out, and then bent the knee.
Well, the the other guys bent the knee since they weren't
around anymore. So yeah, it's unlikely that the
that the Targaryens were offended by this, but they might
still have wanted to play it safe.
And that matters here because we see another example of a dragon
rider escort slash chaperone accompanying a regional army,
just like Rainey's accompanying Oris Baratheon where she's not
being told to do by him, but also vice versa.
So they're kind of like Co leaders, like no one tells the
queen what to do. But also Oris was in charge of
the army, not her, So it's a similar situation here.
No fighting was required, just the invasion force existing and
getting close. Here's the quote to bring it to
a close. The sight of his sails and the
sudden appearance of Queen Visenya and Veigar in the skies
above Sisterton took the heart out of the sister men.
They promptly deposed Queen Marla in favor of her younger
brother Stephen. Sunderland, renewed his fealty
to the Eerie, bent the knee to Queen Vesenia, and gave his sons
over as hostages for his good behavior, one to be fostered
with the Manderleys, the other with the errands.
His sister, the deposed Queen, was exiled and imprisoned.
After five years, her tongue was removed and she spent the
remainder of her life with the Silent sisters tending to the
noble dead. Weird, right?
That is weird. I think this argues that she was
the ambitious one rather than a a a Patsy scapegoat, because why
would they need to do this five years later?
If she if this, what is the scapegoat acting up?
You know, like what? It sounds like she was still
making moves or doing stuff or something that they had to five
years later. Yeah, like that kind of argues
that she was a mover, a shaker rather than a puppet.
That her tongue was wagging. Yeah, her tongue was exactly,
yeah. So the kind of thing she was
saying they were worried would get them all killed or start
trouble or we don't want the Dragons coming back here.
Let's stop it, lady. So yeah, that makes some sense.
There's. So that's kind of where I lean
in terms of the theory here. But, you know, we don't know for
sure what happens if Vicenia is like, flying over the the the
islands there and she sees that order of the Green Hand standard
and is like, didn't we wipe all of them out?
What are they doing here? You know, again, she's probably
not upset, but she might be like, wow, that's weird.
Didn't we win them to our side? Oh, there they are on our side.
Yeah, right on. Yeah.
She's like, well, they're definitely on our team now, so
it's all good. I'm going to say real quick,
that's the most successful use of the military.
This was the most successful battle of the whole conquest.
Right. Yeah.
No one died. One person had their tongue
removed five years later, and that's that's like, it may have
been some people that died that we didn't see, but it was pretty
mild, apparently. As far as wars go, yeah.
Although I guess you wouldn't even call it a war, a conflict,
an incursion. An uprising.
I don't know. Some of the sister men would
still have tales of the rape of the Three Sisters, AKA the
worthless war fought by the Veil in the North for possession of
these Isles. We've talked about that before
and it's just a bad thing. Like it was horrible, horrifying
and and terrifying what they did to the three Sisters.
There was all sorts of atrocities, so not the kind of
thing that's easily forgotten. And this is a good time to kind
of consider, well, who was in this Stark army who came over
with the Manderleys on those galleys?
Was it some of the same people? Obviously Vicena was there, but
were there? Were there actual Starks along
with the Manderleys, or did he just have the Manderleys handle
themselves? Were there Boltons there?
I mean, if Boltons came, that would scare the sister men too,
'cause it was. Recall there was some Belthazar
Bolton who made a pavilion from Flayed Sister Men, and maybe
that's just a story, but maybe there's a grain of truth to it.
Like it wasn't a whole pavilion, it was just a smaller tent of
skin. Yeah.
Or maybe it was a whole pavilion, and only a portion of
it was made out of skin and out the whole thing.
But even if you try to downplay this story, it's still pretty
gruesome, right? Yeah, Yeah.
Nina suggests another possibility, that maybe Stefan
the younger brother, was 1/2 brother, which might have been
why Marla had priority in in order 'cause she was the older
one. So yeah, that's a possibility.
She's also a little perplexed, maybe not perplexed, but
confused in a similar way to We are and that it's hard to pin
down what was going on here because there's a a little bit
of, there's a a couple more details that would tell us a
lot, like one or two more details would mean a lot.
I also think George was thinking about the Anarchy, as in the
Anarchy in England. Marla and Stefan are very
similar names to Matilda, slash Maude and Steven, who were the
two main claimants, and they were related in a similar way.
So one of the arguments against Matilda's claim, by the way, was
that her mother had been a nun, which is similar to how Marla
was cast aside except afterwards and said it before.
We also refer to the Anarchy multiple times in our scripted
coverage of The Dance of the Dragons with Radio Westeros
'cause it's the main parallel to that entire war.
But it's clearly George has used it as a blueprint here and there
elsewhere, because, well, it's a it's a fantastic, real world
story, you know, taking away all the suffering and horror that
happened during it, you know, 1200 years ago or whenever it
was. Exiled and imprisoned is a
little unusual too. Yeah, what's that?
It's. Almost seems like it should be
the other way. Imprisoned.
Like they capture her and put her in jail and then decide, OK,
send her off to Essos. That would be imprisoned in
exile but exiled in a prison. So you send her off to Essos and
then put her in jail and it couldn't even been Essos because
she's with the silent sisters. Yeah, it's.
Just it's weird. She exiled from the sisters,
maybe? I think that's if we piece it
together. The the the best way I can make
sense of it is yes, she was imprisoned for a little while
and then exiled. And then because she kept
talking or trying to stir up trouble, they brought her back,
cut her tongue out, and made her join the Sound sisters.
That's kind of my figure. Like Exile.
Even Exile wasn't enough to stop her from causing trouble,
because again, like if she was just a puppet, they sent her
overseas. Like how could they?
How could she ever be a problem again?
You know, like she was never. She was only ever a problem in
the 1st place because they made her one.
It's possible I I I think there is a scenario where maybe she
was just a scapegoat, but she knew that they did have these
plans, that they're being dishonest, that they weren't
loyal to Targaryens, and then once they made her a scapegoat,
she's not going to let him get away with it.
So she kept telling the truth, which, before the Target Games,
catch wind of our real plan. Yeah, So this again, the
timeline isn't super precise here, but we're pretty sure this
happened before Aegon resolved the Iron Islands.
But either way, the two events somewhat overlap somewhat, and
that would explain why Aegon perhaps didn't come himself, or
it was because Vassanya started it, so let her finish it
something like that because it's technically part of the veil
which was her portion of the conquest.
So either way, they were the last two regions to be settled
before the attempts on Dorne began, and technically Dorne
would never be settled during Aegon's time.
So they were the last two regions to be settled during
Aegon's reign and war with Dorne wouldn't start till the 4th year
after the conquest, so AC4. So this is basically the size of
the realm for like 190 years, a little less than that.
So the the realm is fixed despite the attempts to add
Dorne or maybe the temporary editions of Dorne.
This is basically what it's going to look like in terms of
the borders for until Dorne joins via marriage.
And remember, there had already been a threat and a rejection,
right? Rainey's had already gone there
and flown around to several castles and no one showed up And
she they kept leaving. And then she finally got face to
face with Miria and the yellow, AKA the yellow toad.
And she's like, you know, get out of here, unbowed, unbent,
unbroken. And Rainey said we'll be back
with fire and blood, which she will, but that time won't come
for a few years yet. So technically, there's been no
fighting between Dorne and the new Iron Throne yet, which is
partly why they're able to space this time out.
As we'll see, there's actually going to be some more
negotiations there going to be another try at a peaceful
resolution. We'll talk about that a little
later in the episode. OK, let's get into the interim
properly here. The the narrative in Fire and
Blood focuses its attention on how the realm was ruled after
the end of the Dornish Wars. But clearly this all happened in
concert. In other words, the the, the
descriptions of what happens after the Dornish War must have
started before it because the Dornish War started.
It took nine years and it didn't start till the 4th year.
So stuff was happening before that in terms of setting up a
new regime and and making some of these policies.
But it's described as happening after that.
I just think that's how the book is laid out, you know, because
he doesn't want to discuss the real progresses and then discuss
them again, discuss all these marriages between and then
discuss them again. It would be sort of repetitive.
So I think there's, but that's still, it's a lot of time,
right? Four years roughly or maybe 3
1/2 between Aegon's coronation and the beginning of the next
serious war. That's a substantial amount of
time, and it's at a time, a very crucial time when the Kingdom is
new and a lot of stuff needs doing.
And if we consider the Ironborn and three sisters needing Dragon
Rider attention, So there were wars going on, but those were
largely confined, like they didn't spill out into other
areas. And in fact, the Sisters, as we
just described, wasn't really a war at all, unless there was
some. There might have been an uptick
in in shipwrecking and and maybe some piracy, but other than
that, it wasn't. It still didn't rise to the
level of war, like I said, and neither were relatively
protracted either. They ended pretty quickly.
So it was fairly peaceful after the field of fire and the
burning of Harrenhal. And in part that's why it was
fairly peaceful, because people didn't want to see a repeat of
those things. They knew what they were up
against. So you could say maybe it was an
uneasy piece or maybe more accurately it was a period of
adjustment. What would you say, Sean?
How would you would you frame it that way or what do you think
here? Creative adjustment, for sure.
Through a lot of this, I was thinking about the idea that
when America declared independence, it was in the
midst of the war that we were writing the Articles of
Confederation. And it took a couple years to do
that. And then eventually that was
also replaced by the Constitution.
And that also took some time, you know.
So, you know, they didn't quite have the same sort of written
documentation of the former government they were going to
have. But it still would take some
policy decisions and people being put in place and all.
And kind of like you were saying, like if you're like
teaching this, if you're, you know, writing this out or
whatever, you don't go back and forth between some battle in
South Carolina and some meeting in Pennsylvania about the
Articles of Confederation back to some battle master.
You just talk about all the battles, then you talk about all
the Articles of Confederation and separate topics, you know,
so, and I think that's probably what was happening.
Even through the course of the war with Dorn, they're probably
still establishing certain positions and certain, you know,
dipping out land, setting up marriages.
All these governmental type things are happening
concurrently with the WAR type things.
Right on, yeah. I I That's tends to be the way I
lean as well. So I think it looks like we
agree on that now. Yeah, 'cause it can't be
understated what a giant change this was for Westeros.
Yes, in a way you could see it coming from a historical
perspective. The kingdoms, we they've gone
from thousands or or hundreds of kingdoms down to seven or eight
or whatever you want to call it. However you define Kingdom, it's
not terribly important to get that number precise.
The point is the same. There was a shrinkage in the
number of kingdoms, more unity, more that.
So this was kind of a a natural step forward.
It was just a matter of someone needing to do it, someone having
the ability to pull it all together.
It probably would have happened eventually, even without
Dragons, though it would have probably taken longer, maybe a
lot longer. So this is the kind of thing we
covered in our Under the Dragon series, which is we've we've
done a couple episodes on that in different regions and how
they were affected by the early rain of the Dragons.
And of course we have one episode on before the Dragons
which was the state of the realm just before the conquest began.
So in terms of these new policies and this new way of
ruling the realm, we we get to have an extra fun here because
we can look at how they started and then later look at how they
did or didn't work out In the long term.
Because we've got a lot of Targaryen history in front of us
coming up over the however long it takes us to go through all
this and at a very high level many of the great Lords of
Westeros would be preoccupied with getting their vassals to
accept the new state of affairs. Meaning there's changes.
They're like, well some things would be different with tax
structure and and your obligations to your Lords and
certain titles would be redefined.
Just a general restructuring. Any of you has ever worked at a
big company that has an organizational restructure, even
a small company having organizational restructure where
people take different titles and people move around.
Sometimes it's a really good thing, it's very needed,
sometimes it's not, but a lot of times it's very necessary.
Like things are just kind of out of whack.
It's good reset, get things, things have fallen off and then
rather than trying to pick them up one at a time, you do the
difficult thing and it's like a full house cleaning.
You know something. You want to keep your house
clean, but sometimes you need to get under the couches and clean
the window sills and just get to areas that have really needed
work and haven't gotten it. That's kind of what's happening
here. Some of these structures have
existed for so long that having a refresh or a reset is actually
a very good thing. And sometimes it takes a
negative thing to pump that right, like the basement floods.
All right, well, the basement's about to get clean better than
it ever has before, right? It sucks that it flooded, but
it's going to prompt this action that has been put off.
So some of these changes probably should have happened in
Westeros already, and it took a war to push it so.
Yeah, and the what's interesting is where a lot of that burden
falls. Yes, a lot of these high Lords
will have to find ways to make their vassals happy with this
new state of affairs, while also finding ways to accept it
themselves. But it's interesting that a lot
of the burden of this change fell on their children and not
their heirs so much as their younger children and as it often
does, as often these things do 'cause they don't inherit
things. So they're often left with being
the hostage or the marriage, the hand in marriage that has to be
given to to create an alliance or something like that.
So let's check out a quote here on and many days on this topic
how the High Lords face this. It's their chill rather their
the children of the High Lords face this on a day-to-day basis.
Quote. The reconciliation of the Seven
Kingdoms to Targaryen rule was the keystone of Aegon the
First's policies as king. To this end, he made great
efforts to include men and even a few women from every part of
the realm in his court and councils.
His former foes were encouraged to send their children, chiefly
younger sons and daughters, as most great Lords desired, to
keep their heirs close to home to court, where the boys served
as pages, cup bearers and Squires, the girls as
handmaidens and companions to Aegon's Queens In King's
Landing. They witnessed the King's
justice at first hand and were urged to think of themselves as
legal subjects of 1 Great Realm, not as Western Men or
Stormlanders or Northmen. Yeah, that's a really
interesting way to think about it, right?
That he is trying to create a new noble culture where they
don't think of themselves step. It's probably easier for certain
realms than others. It's probably harder to get the
Northmen to think themselves as part of 1 Realm or the Ironborn.
But the Westerman, the Starlanders, the Riverlanders,
the Reach, their culture was already a lot similar, so that
might have been a bit easier task there.
They already worship the same gods.
They already have, you know care about things like knighthood and
they have similar views on marriage and eat a lot of the
same foods. So that was probably easier and
that's in some cases than others.
But there's always individuals to to reckon with.
Some people are just stubborn and some people are just very
adaptive and who knows where these individuals came from.
There's nothing about Northerners that's fundamentally
less adaptive. I don't think you know from if
there. If you get taught things at an
early age, you you still have that malleability to to change
and see the world differently than than someone who's maybe
been stuck in their ways for 50 years or something like that.
So this is pretty fascinating. It's also a pattern that's
existed for a long time. I mean the idea of pages, cup
bearers, Squires, handmaidens and companions.
We've seen this so much in A Song of Ice and Fire.
It comes up very often here and there, but court and council is
a pretty broad term, isn't it? Like that's what is courts a
little, or councils a little simpler.
Although at this era the small council wasn't fully defined, so
it's still kind of vague. But court, like every court, is
different. Like who's allowed there?
Like the vibe, the culture, you know, how much they talk,
whether they gossip, whether they don't, whether they're like
to party or are very, you know, stern or it just the different
vibes. And if you go through different
courts of different Targaryen kings or of non Targaryen kings,
you see that it's it can change quite a bit.
Like consider Aegon the 4th versus Aegon the 5th, the huge
difference just there between 2 Aegons.
Or compare say, Aegon the first, Aegon the 4th.
Massive difference there. You've got a guy who's pretty
serious. Pretty determined hard worker
versus a guy who's just a complete waste of of space is a
horrible person. Even counsel, especially at this
point could be very different because you think of counsel as
like this close group of advisors, right?
That's sort of what it basically would be.
But it might have been a little different at this point because
when he needed counsel on things far away, he needed to know
what's going on in the north, in the West and Iron Islands.
And he was traveling there also, right?
Yeah. So his council would have been
more spread out. That's true geographically and
probably a greater number of people spread out over a greater
number of locations and and I bet his court was larger than
normal to anyone's courts later on that were large were probably
because of the president he was setting because he needed to
include as many people as. Possible, yeah.
It was a policy, Yeah, for sure. Like, I I don't know if this is
exactly the the best way to look at it, but I bet his court was
There's all kinds of weird exceptions.
I realize this is complicated to say, but what I want to say is
it. I bet his court was more than
seven times bigger than any one of the other Seven Realms
courts. I could see that, yeah.
I could totally see that, yeah. It's hard to say 7 because drama
isn't a part of it. You see what I'm saying.
It was relatively bigger, proportionately bigger than any
other. He was intentionally trying to
bring as many young nobles there as possible in order to impart
this new attitude, this new level of culture, and just to
show them, to remind them who's boss.
Picture yourself as one of these people.
Let's imagine this twice. Once as someone who's a bit like
Sansa, someone who's heard about court, who's excited about the
possibility, who thinks it's an amazing place to be, wants to be
a part of it, maybe sees opportunity for advancement,
maybe just is excited about it for a number of different
reasons, or someone like. Opportunity for handsome boys.
Sure. Or if you're if we're
pretending. Or girls, if you're if this is a
male Sansa, Sansa or someone like Ned where who is like does
not want to go to court, it's like I'd rather stay home.
I like it here much better, You know they can do their thing.
I'll I'd rather do that. But that is forced to go.
Someone who has to go that doesn't want to picture it from
both of their angles. That someone I this isn't like
now I don't mean like a Sansa who's eventually going to be
disillusioned of their someone who's naive 'cause this is not
someone who's there's no Joffrey in this scenario.
These these they're not getting forced to marry some awful
Prince. Now there are probably some
examples of arranged marriages for some of these people that
didn't work out, and there might be a few Joffrey's in there, but
it's certainly not like an odd like.
Don't take the Sansa scenario too.
Strictly here, take it as the Sansa mentality going into it.
That's what you're. Looking not the not the actual
way it plays out. Yeah.
So versus the Ned mentality, he's not going to play out with
him dying. He was having his head chopped
off either. Like that's not necessarily how
it's going to go, but just that attitude and then showing up at
court for the first time, OK, so let's let's envision it as the
sansa. The Sansa shows up and she's
like, OK, this isn't quite what I thought, because I came from
Winterfell or Highgarden or something like that, and this is
just a wooden keep at this point.
It's the Aegon for it. It's just logs and dirt.
And it's like, OK, this isn't really what I pictured for the
king who just conquered the entire continent with this.
But then they see like Valerian and you're like, oh, OK, well,
that I now I get it, you know, because not a lot.
A lot of them would still not have seen Valerian or any of the
Dragons, despite how much they had been seen.
There's still been a lot of young nobles that would not have
seen them, especially a lot of the girls, 'cause they wouldn't
have been anywhere near the battlefield.
And a lot of the young men too, 'cause some of them would have
been near the battlefield, but some of them would have been
young enough to not go, or some of them just their house never
fought. Like a lot of the houses in the
Vale may still not have seen a dragon yet, because the Senja
went to outside Gull Town to burn the ships and then straight
to the Erie to accept the surrender.
So there wasn't a lot of in between, so a lot of them may
not have seen it. So like House Royce May, that's
a pretty major name, may not have seen a dragon yet, you
know, or especially not Valerian.
They may have seen Veigar. So they're all taking one at a
time. They're all arriving or in
groups and and being simultaneously like what's up
with this log thing, but also overwhelmed by the Dragons and
perhaps Aegon and his sisters as well, because they're very
exceptional both in visage and, you know, prior reputation.
So that that would be kind of an unusual, like, wow, they've got
this, they're amazing, but they need a New Castle, don't they?
You know, and remember, this is the mindset of a noble like you
or me, probably we wouldn't be like, this is dingy, you know,
we'd be like, I don't think I'd have thoughts like that, but I
wasn't bored. Extreme wealth, so.
There might be some, Ned included, who might be more
satisfied with it. People who are more appreciative
of a Spartan lifestyle might be happy rather than not wasting a
bunch of resources on gold statues.
You know that might be more OK with it.
And some might come from similarly meager castles
themselves, right? Like, I don't know, someone from
Barrowtown or whatever, like most of them probably came from
the more major houses. It would expect nicer quarters,
but but some of them also might have been impressed.
Especially the ones that may be more knowledgeable might be like
they might have the same mentality.
You're saying like, this is kind of crappy compared to my home,
but some of them might be like, wow, this was built in how long?
Yeah. Yeah, it's already this big,
like there's. And they might, some of them
might be excited to see what it turns into.
They're like, oh, this is clearly just the start.
They're going to build more. And you can already see when you
arrive at King's Landing, well, there's like a building is going
up. There's probably multiple
buildings under construction when they showed up, and that
state of affairs would continue for the rest of their lives.
King's Landing is going to grow really rapidly.
The Red Keep isn't going to be finished till 45 AC.
There's just a lot going on. King's Landing is going to be an
incredibly bustling place. And it's not just the city, it's
also the Cat the the Red Keep. Well, beg on Fort and then the
Red Keep. As I thought I had a little
earlier when we were talking about the idea of all these
people coming here and how large the court would be that they've
got to be prepared for this. So there's got to be enough
cooks and food and stables and everything else for all these
people. They've been brought to court.
And once you have that established, well, you're not
going to peel back, right? You're going to continue to take
advantage of all the infrastructure that's built.
So the court will stay big and become a center of communication
and trade and everything else. Absolutely.
Now, Nina brings up another great point here.
Compare this scenario to Danny, which we're going to have
several comparisons to Danny throughout this episode.
As always, Danny is a great parallel to Egg on the
Conqueror, but this is a part of the parallel that is not as
explored as much. Like people focus on a lot of
the basics. Like, OK, three Dragons
conquering, you know, establishing a dynasty verse,
reestablishing it, a lot of parallels there.
A black dragon specifically, you know all these other things.
But Danny in Marine had to learn how to rule after having of an
exceptional conquest over the area and kind of beating them
fairly easily, right? And and she didn't even have as
much dragon power, and in fact quite a lot less dragon power.
And in fact in fact she had no dragon power during most of the
conquering of Slaver's Bay other than Drogon burning the face of
1 slaver. You know during the the the
trick for the Unsullied. So mostly was the Unsullied that
did the damage there and and her Dothraki and some other things
so. But that aside, it's a similar
scenario where she comes into a place, takes it over and has to
make a lot of changes, has to make change to the culture, and
wants to rearrange how things are done.
And she's dealing with a stubborn nobility, one that's
not really pleased with her. Now To be fair, the Westerosi
nobles were probably more accepting of Aegon than the
Mirror Knees are of Danny. There's some prior anger towards
the Targaryens and Valyrians based on the history of the
Ghiscari Empire and the Valyrian Empire which does.
That kind of background doesn't exist with Westeros.
That sort of, you know, anti dragon attitude wasn't there.
And they're more hostile as well because she's making bigger
changes. Like there's no ending of
slavery that Aegon's trying to pull up.
In fact, Aegon very much so, is a policy of changing as little
as possible in the short term. In the longer term, he changes
more. But in those first few years,
he's very cautious not to change too much because he doesn't want
to get anyone too upset. He doesn't want to encourage
rebellions, he doesn't. He wants to keep everything safe
and peaceful, which you know you you don't want to see certain,
you want certain laws needed to be changed and maybe there's
definitely some things I would say you should have changed
those sooner. But I respect as a policy not
just forcing a bunch of changes all at once, given that's
probably better for keeping the violence at a minimum, That's
the most important thing, I think.
And enabling more change down the line, right?
If you change a whole bunch up front, people might have a hard
time accepting any of the changes.
But if you do one thing at a time, by the time you get to the
fifth one, then they'll be more on board with you.
That's true. That's a good point.
It's also an extra challenge that Danny has is that this is
fundamental to their way of life, like the morality aside,
which you know, not that we shouldn't address that too.
But for example, if Aegon wanted the Iron Islands to stop
sailing, stop using boats, yeah, it would just be crazy.
The idea that would just be crazy.
And it would almost be impossible to get them to do
that. Now if somehow using boats was
immoral, we might root for Aegon to do that.
But. But you could still see the
trouble he would have Even if sailing was immoral, it would be
still really hard to get this people whose culture is based on
it to stop doing it. Yeah, agreed.
Agreed. Yeah, that's that's a solid
example. Yeah.
So there's really for Danny to change their ways and it's Aegon
is faced with a similar scenario.
Perhaps not so many of these things aren't so deeply
entrenched. He's not trying to make any any.
No, no single change Aegon is trying to make is as large as
ending slavery in Marine probably.
So that's a a worthy consideration.
Now let's look at this too. Some of these an opportunity,
right? Some of these people who are
second sons, third sons, daughters, what have you, they
were like, well, what is my what's what's my outlook in
life? I'm not going to inherit
Winterfell or Highgarden or what have you.
I got to go out into the world and make my own thing.
Well, maybe that opportunity is at this newly formed
governmental authority that, hey, maybe I can make friends
with the right people. Like it's an opportunity.
It's a no one has climbed these ladders yet.
Like there are ladders of power to be climbed in the Targaryen
regime. But no one's really done that
yet, except for maybe a handful of people who are already close
to Aegon prior to the the war, and maybe a few powerful people
who would have gotten in his good graces in that short period
of time since the end of Hostilities.
Like there's a Nina mentions the shave page.
Someone who's like, good, we can finally take it to these slavers
and make these changes, right? There's there isn't a person
like that that we know of in Westeros who's like, yeah, let's
stick it to the nobility that it's about time they got taken
down a peg or two. It's not really like that.
So there are some parallels, but there are also parallels that
that don't work. Not and not every aristocratic
family is going to have a place at court, in part because they
don't have anyone to send, right?
Like the Oris Baratheon took over the took over House
Durrington, but there wouldn't have been a child to send
anyway, even if he hadn't, right?
There was the daughter who was the only heir.
So they're not going to send the only heir to court.
Or what if you go to the Lannisters?
Tyrion says that his ancestor escaped the field of fire and
bent the knee, and then fathered a son, for which he's duly
grateful. Because if he hadn't fathered a
son, Terry and himself would never have been born.
So that implies that the Lord of Castor Rock at the time of the
field of fire did not have a son, which means that these he
these came later. He may have had daughters, who
knows? And maybe they went to court.
That's an interesting option to consider is these opportunities
at court were happening, but if a family just doesn't have
children to send there, then they can't take part in this.
Like maybe they could send an uncle to try to like get on the
council or something. But yeah, it's a funny scenario
where you just if your house is too small, you can't, you can't
participate. It is interesting to think how
some houses strengths might have been increased and diminished
just based on that arbitrary factor in that moment.
Yeah. Again, I think I may have even
used this example before. Those of you who know The
Expanse, it's the term, the churn.
And that's when like, there's a big rearranging of things that
are completely out of your control, like all like a
government rearranges itself or a war is happening and Someone
Like You or me, we have no ability to, to affect anything.
All we can do is hope to survive it and then find our place in
this new environment, whatever that happens to be, however it
shapes out. And so this is a time, this is
that level of change. It is a churn, A Westeros churn
where some people are going to be ground up in it and not
survive it. Or and by survive, I don't
necessarily mean they'll be killed, but their their income
might be destroyed. Their place in in society might
be, might not exist anymore. There the some honors they had
gained might not carry the same social or cultural weight that
they used to. Things that you're proud of
might now be negatives by a lot, might be viewed as negative by a
lot of people. We've seen these things happen
in the real world all the time. So in terms of Foster rings,
just think of all the examples. Let me just throw a few others
out here just to set the stage a little more like Jamie and Lord
Titus Blackwood, for example. First of all, Lord Titus
Blackwood when he surrenders to Jamie and A Dance With Dragons
he's kind of nice about it a little bit.
Jamie's like, well, which hostage do you want to send?
He said first he asked for his daughter Bethany and Titus is
clearly disturbed by that. And he's like, well, can I send
this son of mine who likes books and isn't much of A warrior And
Jamie's like, yeah sure, you know that's fine with me.
He's like, but but but don't but but don't forget what this is
all about. You know, like this is a hostage
and we will kill him if we, you know, if you don't behave.
And he's like, I know who I'm dealing with Kingslayer, you
know, it's a great exchange. So Jamie was like, yeah, I'm
going to be nice about it. But don't mistake this for
softness. Don't mistake my niceness my
giving you leeway for softness. And I doubt anyone mistake or
mistook Aegon's position for soft.
He's like, yeah, send me your children.
Send me your yeah, second born. It doesn't.
It's fine. I don't need your first born.
Just send me as many as you can. Now the implication might be.
Better Cindy, What if you don't? I might.
If you don't send me fossils, I might ask for some specific ones
you know. If you don't choose, I might
choose for you. And if you outright refuse,
well, you don't want to do that. You don't want to, you don't
want to find out what happens. You know, if you don't do that,
don't, don't test the Conqueror. And what would they be doing?
What are these wealthy nobles, young nobles who are with no
jobs? Yeah, as you write in the test
shot, you wrote what? These?
What? No.
Jobs get a job, but they don't. Do any of them do?
Yeah, just sit around with the land they inherited and no jobs,
I guess I some of them hopefully are being productive.
I don't know reading and training or funding bridges to
be built across streams and irrigation systems or something,
but I feel like most of them are really wasting the resources
their their underlings. Yeah, I I think a good a good
amount of education and training would happen for sure, 'cause
that's that's just seems like the part of all noble upbringing
and and some hunting and you know, their their regular
pursuits, which isn't necessarily a a good thing.
It's just a thing really. It's not really that bad either,
just whatever. So, but I think the education
part is interesting because this is where there's a chance for
Aegon to push some of his agencies or his agenda, which is
to get these youngsters to see the realm differently, to stop
seeing it as a bunch of realms and see it as one realm.
And that's a part of the education.
Like if he's influencing the maesters and then having a say
in what they teach these youngsters, I feel like that's
at the top of the list, given what emphasis is placed on here
in the source. And we know Aegon was big on
maesters. He had one that always was with
him. I think he also had one on
Dragonstone. The Senya and Rainey's had their
own maesters too, so they weren't stinting on the
maesters. So I think that says a lot about
the fact that he was big on having maesters around.
And one of these kids here, I think he very likely was not
maybe not aggressive, but forthright about educating them
in a certain way. I wouldn't call it
indoctrination, but it was certainly, it certainly had it.
There was certainly a plan behind it.
You know, a big question I have here is royal progresses.
They were a huge part of Aegon's policy towards keeping the peace
and for spreading his authority and reminding people of who he
was and the cost of rebellion. By confronting them face to face
with what they'd be going up against, he placed a lot of
value in them. Here's an actual rare quote from
Aegon himself. It's better to forestall
rebellions than put them down, Aegon famously said when asked
the reasons for his journeys. A glimpse of the king in all his
power, mounted on Valerian the Black Dread and attended by
hundreds of Knights glittering in silk and steel, did much to
instill loyalty and restless Lords.
Small folk need to see their kings and Queens from time to
time as well, the king added. And no, they might have the
chance to lay their grievances and concerns before him.
I want to point out this is a lesson that Ranira should have
learned. Yes, absolutely.
After Viscera said that she was going to inherit, she flew
around, you know, once every couple months to all the
different Lords with her dragon to remind everyone I'm going to
be queen one day. She might have had more support
when the time came. To be fair, book Ranira did
quite a lot more of this than than show Ranira.
Although most of it I think was when her father was still alive.
She did, she was seen by. That's how she got the
reputation for being the Realms delight and why so she had such
popularity as a young as a younger person which is part of
why she took took it for granted later, which I don't.
I don't think the show brought that part out as much.
But anyway we're we're not talking show too much today so
let's let's keep it going. Given the sheer number of
progress that he went on during his reign and how important he
viewed them, I think they probably started this early,
right? He didn't have that much else
going on besides he went to the Iron Islands that one time and
sorted that out. He didn't go to the veil, he
didn't go to Dorne, at least not yet.
And we know that he generally gave over a lot of the
day-to-day ruling and building of the Aegon Fort to Visenia,
which would give him leave to be elsewhere, possibly on some of
these progresses, though we're also told that he spent a lot of
time back on Dragonstone. So this is just a brief note
about those progresses, 'cause we're going to speak to them a
little more later because they're such a bigger part of
his later reign. And now we're only theorizing
that they probably started this early.
He's going to be making like 3 decades worth of progresses.
And I think also there's like a lot of these things that they
probably changed over time, like how many people he brought, the
type of attitude he was spreading.
He was probably a little more domineering early on, or a
little more about showing his power later.
It was more about maintaining and just keeping keeping things
tight rather than locking them down.
You know there's locking it down and then there's keeping it
locked down, right? You can imagine over time he
might have formed some genuine relationships with people too.
Yeah, that's true. Like really befriended some of
the other Lords or soldiers and what when he went to visit them,
he probably like gained a lot of insights about their culture or
their how their cities are structured and such things that
he was worried about himself. He would have huge value on its
own, enough to just have this show of force remind everyone
who's in charge. But there are all these other
values to come from it too. Yes, you're right.
That's that's a very good point about certain Lords would like
plenty would suck up to him, but there would be some that
actually that they actually got along like you say like a
genuine connection maybe even friendship.
Even though Aegon perhaps wasn't big on that.
There would be a few that you know he liked more than others
will say. Now, as you said, he did travel
with a lot of people, and that was expensive, but that was
intentional. He wasn't just throwing money
away. He wanted to make sure to remind
people what they were up against.
This very just a show of force, shock and awe.
Well, just awe. Not shock so much because
there's no one. There's no attacking here.
If he could bring all this just to say, hey, what's up?
What if there was war? What's he going to bring if we
actually speak out against him, right.
And. Then they have to picture like,
who's going to go against this guy?
Like, so who's going to be on my side if I go against this guy?
Like they're all, you know, it's a double, it's a double whammy,
at least. And you know, to further my
other point, all these other people he's bringing, they also
can form bonds with the different people that he's
visiting, right? All the soldiers that are coming
from these different lands, which is again part of what he
want. He wants this intermixing of
cultures. He wants everyone to feel like
they're part of the whole big same thing.
So in just like he might form a bond with a certain Lord, or a
certain master of arms, or whatever else, all his
underlings and soldiers, when they go visit these other
castles, form these same bonds, give these same connections,
make it less likely for them to want to go a war with each
other. Yeah, right.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And the other angle here is there's a few houses here and
there, a few spots here and there that were given over to
Valyrian nobles, Harrenhal being the main 1.
Quentin Coharis, his first wife had died three years prior to
two AC, which is when he got the castle.
So he married again to a daughter of his own new Lord
Paramount, Edmund Tully and Quentin, that's Quentin Coharis
already had a grandson and two sons, so he wasn't a young man
at the time. And this is interesting just
because it's a Valyrian descended house marrying into
the Riverlands and maybe they had some silver hair and so
there was like a little bit of that going around.
But it's another thing, like if you befriend this guy Quentin
Coharis, a guy who was probably pretty close to Aegon.
It's an in route to befriending the king or having a connection
or just a foot in the door. And there would be a few people
like that out there that we're already close to Aegon and
someone who's got a friendship with the king.
If you can't get access to the king, well, maybe you get access
to someone that's close to him and vice versa, or or farther
down the line. Maybe if you can't get access to
Quentin Coharis, you get access to his master at arms and maybe
work your way up. This is that ladder climbing
that I referred to earlier that a lot of people would be doing
and there'd be a lot of opportunity for it because
again, these are new ladders that haven't been scaled yet.
The. Ladder's higher than it's ever
been. Yeah, yeah, right.
That's something Aegon did. Just make a taller.
Ladder. Yeah, it's a great point.
The ladder is higher than it's ever been.
You're right. The chaos is a ladder.
But the ladder's height is not determined, is not the same
always. Yeah.
So let's, let's return briefly to this idea of the early court
and what it was like. Like I said, no, Red Keep.
There was the Aegon Fort, which wasn't replaced until 35 AC.
So the Aegon Fort. This log structure was there for
quite a while. Aegon died in 37 AC, so he
didn't really live in the Red Keep, especially 'cause it was
barely, it wasn't even finished till 45 AC.
So when we discuss at court, it's difficult because it's
really easy to picture all the different scenes of the Red Keep
on TV and in your book memory because there's so many book
scenes that take place at the Red Keep.
But the Aegon Fort is so different.
It was surely fancy as far as log long hauls, but again, the
places these youngsters were raised, showing up there,
they're like, well this is this is kind of a step down some
foolish few might even be, might even say so out loud I'd be
like, well this is, this is, this is way worse than where I
came from. Like dude, shut up, keep that to
yourself. Here's what it actually is
described as the physical description of that place from
the book. The crude motte and Bailey Fort
that Aegon had thrown up so quickly was neither large enough
nor grand enough to house the king in his court, and had begun
to expand even before the Conquest was complete.
A new keep was erected, all of logs and 50 feet high, with a
cavernous long haul beneath it and a kitchen made of stone and
roofed with slate in case of fire.
Across the Bailey, stables appeared.
Then a granary. A new watchtower was raised
twice as tall as the older one. Soon the Aegon Fort was
threatening to burst out of its walls, so a new palisade was
raised in closing more of the hilltop, creating space enough
for a barracks, an Armory, A Sept and a drum tower.
So a lot going on really there. There was quite a bit of
construction I want. To go to the Drum Tower.
What's The Drum Tower? I'll be right at home there,
yeah. All sorts of drumming, yeah.
Aegon was very big on percussion.
Yeah, he was. He was, he was himself a
drummer. Yeah.
And so there's a lot going on here.
Of course, it's kind of neat to see just the the way that a, a
new area that becomes important starts to grow is.
It's kind of a fascinating process.
But just imagine, again, just picture yourself as one of these
nobles. They don't even have a stable
here. You know, like, no stables.
Wow. Like, what is going on here?
But then there's again, you see Valerian sitting there and
you're like, Yep, all right, that's they have that instead.
They just can't get over that. Like, what would that be like?
You're like a 13 year old, let's say Lannister at this era, there
wouldn't have been a 13 year old Lannister boy.
So we'll say a girl, and you show up and let's say you kind
of have that sense of, like, excitement about this, but you
haven't seen a dragon before. And you're like, Oh my God, that
thing really is as big as they say.
And I will behave because I don't want to have to deal with,
like, Aegon's not going to feed anyone to his dragon, especially
not some young girl, but she doesn't know that.
You know, they're going to be inventing things in their heads,
and a lot of it's going to be fear.
And their their father and mother would have told them to
behave. And it's like I'm going off to
boarding school or something, but it's it's a different sort
of boarding school. So a lot of people have seen
this, but more and more people are getting eyes on the king.
Let me quickly describe what a few of these things mean,
because I think a lot of y'all probably don't know what a Mott
and Bailey Castle even is. Mott is not, is a raised, is
raised ground. So like a hill that the castle
is built on, it can be an artificial hill or one that was
already there. A Bailey is the courtyard, which
is walls and a ditch meaning a Moat often times where it
doesn't have to have water in it, it's not If it doesn't have
water in it, it's a dry Moat. But that's a ditch and a dry
Moat is the same thing. Walls can be made of stone or
wood or what have you. Then you have a keep itself, so
you have the Mott, the Bailey and the actual castle slash
keep. So that's what the Aegon Fort
was. A very basic, simple thing.
Like when, for example, William the Conqueror took England, he
built lots of mountain Bailey castles all over the place to
help enforce the new regime 'cause he didn't have the threat
of Dragons to keep people from rejecting his rule.
It was a lot harder for him to get the English to accept his
rule because yeah, he didn't have some super weapon to
intimidate everyone to to all help.
So by the time he was crowned at Old Town King's Landing was
quote, several thousand souls. But the book and the book has
some fun descriptions of specific buildings that went up.
We'll we'll check in later in 10 years and 20 years to see how
far it's come along. But Aegon Ford had walls, but
the King's Landing itself did not.
And it would be hard to build walls around it because like,
well, how big is it going to get?
Where do you put the walls? Where like how much expansion
room do you leave? And they were probably a little
bit, I don't say arrogant, but probably not too worried about
like who's going to attack. Of all the places to attack, why
would you attack the place where there's one to three Dragons?
Well, you might attack when those Dragons are gone.
That's the answer. You probably wouldn't do it
while they're there. So if you could have
intelligence on when they're going to be gone and how long
they're going to be gone, that might be your opportunity and
that is going to come up later. So keep that in mind.
You also have to worry about smaller scale things too.
Like you know maybe like the Storm land is going to organize
an assault on Kings Landing, but seven bandits in the woods might
run in and try good if you got all these resources gathered
there now. So someone going to come steal
some horses or chickens or whatever.
So you need to have some sort of security.
Or some horse chickens. They might steal the horse
chickens. I would.
I would be targeting those because, yeah.
I go for the chicken horses. Not as not as fast, but not as
big. It's easier to grab.
Yeah, those are kind of like Bitter Steel's sigil, right?
The chicken horses, Yeah, you just slight alteration to the
wings, make them look more chickeny, less Dragon Y.
There you go. So there was no, like I said,
there was a small council, but it wasn't fully formed.
It's it's effect on the King wasn't fully established.
The roles were still being defined.
There wasn't yet a Grand Maester.
It would happen in the Year 5. So we're close to that And it
was Aegon's idea. Each of Aegon, Viceni and
Rainey's like I said had their own Maester.
So they were big on that. I said there's just lots of
growth right? Land Sea Valaria and Celtigar
ships were there often and over time that expanded.
You'd see more ships from Duskendale and Gull Town and
other spots like that just up and up more and more.
So we'll be coming back to this once more time has passed to
check in on this growth, like I said, and to watch the
burgeoning capital of Westeros. Some smart people really got a
leg up. But you got to think, Sean, like
imagine being one of the first guys to like open a a shop there
in the city that's eventually going to be the largest in
Westeros in a pretty short time. Like you could open it in the
Year 5 AC and by the year 25 AC the city's like 100,000 people
or more and your business is probably booming.
You probably just like. But that was a great decision,
like a life changing decision that worked out really well.
Some smart people, some ambitious people, really like,
really made their really would have made their fortunes by
moving to King's Landing when it was young and then later too,
but especially the the, the new people.
I I can't help but want to point out the Whether you were lucky
to happen to be there or smart enough to realize how important
it was to be there, it still takes more.
You still have to do the work. You have to grow with a
business. You have to make that that type
of growth would have had a lot of adjustments in 20 years,
right? So a lot of people might have
screwed it up and not taking advantage of that opportunity if
they didn't work hard enough or have enough vision.
So. Right on, yeah.
And. When you have a city full of
people who are working hard with a lot of vision, that's a that's
a good scenario. Yeah, I bet it was a pretty
optimistic time. I think it might have been like
a nice vibe in King's Landing where a lot of people were, you
know, nodding to each other on the street and smiling and being
like, yeah, this is, this is going to be good.
You know, the the outlook was probably very positive.
I mean, you're building a new city.
That seems like a really good thing.
You know, like for the most part, yeah, cities have their
problems, but it's still an exciting process probably to be
a part of. It's something that, like in the
modern world, it's hard to imagine like this, all this.
Most of the cities are already there.
You know, I'm sure there's some some of us out there, some of
you out there probably lived in a have either lived in a small
town that grew a lot larger or maybe the opposite of a town
that shrank because some large industry left or multiple
industries or something like that.
Yeah. So if this story of early King's
Landing touches on some of your own experiences, feel free to
share them with us. We love hearing from Y'all,
especially about things that relate directly to the material.
So, Sean, you, for the last few times that you've been
describing your drink, you've said you've got magic Mine in
there. How's that working for you?
Is it you're making a difference in your life?
Is it you noticing anything improvement in anything like
that? Sometimes it's hard to measure
because there's so many other parts of your diet and your
activity and everything, but it's not been negative in any
way. And I do feel like I've had more
energy at the gym. I don't even know if that's
something that they would like, put out there as a benefit,
'cause I think it's supposed to be more of like a creative
stimulant or whatever. But I feel like I have more
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worn out afterwards, so that's cool.
That's positive for sure, yeah. We have read and maybe I
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description of something that is meant to help stimulate parts of
your brain. Yeah, I enjoyed looking at the
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Not that COVID is always mild, but sometimes it is And long
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like Sean said, maybe that manifests as physical energy.
I've seen that before and myself, like sometimes I'm more
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And I I don't know what it is but I think a lot of times it's
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Westeros 20. All right, let's talk marriages.
We talked about fosterings and how a lot of these young people
at court would be going there in this brave new world.
Maybe a chance to move up in the world, at least learning new
things. And there's lots of different
ways this can play out, but for some of them, it's going to
result in marriages. I mean, that's in most of their
futures anyway. Marriages amongst the nobility
is well, it's rare that you see people not get married in the
year 2 AC Cerise Hightower was born.
She's an important figure during the time of King Megor.
After all, she was his first wife and it's the first
Targaryen Hightower marriage. And of course that's well before
the Dance of the Dragons, but it is a bit of set up, or at least
foreshadowing for that. So Speaking of Aegon's big on
creating alliances, big on creating peace and fostering
relationships between his new regime and the existing houses.
So of course arranged marriages are obviously going to be a big
part of this. That's an always long standing
traditional method of creating alliances is by creating new
families, these families which have connections to prior
existing families and still bear those same surnames.
The right of marriage is a major power granted to kings, Queens,
Lords and ladies. We've seen that.
Like it's their explicit right. You know you cannot marry
without permission for the most part, even when you're a
commoner like Roose. Bolton points that out in his
really gross description of Ramsay's mother as he's his
excuse was that they married without his permission.
So this is very important. Political marriages are very
valuable in terms of keeping the peace and or gaining and or
holding power. Let's hear from the book
directly on this one quote. The Targaryens also brokered
many marriages between noble houses from the far ends of the
realm in hopes that such alliances would help tie the
conquered lands together and make the Seven Kingdoms 1 Egons,
Queens, Visenya and Rainies took a special delight in arranging
these matches. Through their efforts, young
Ronald Aaron, Lord of the Erie, took a daughter of Torrance
Stark of Winterfell to wed whilst Lauren Lannisters, eldest
son, heir to Casterly Rock, married a red wine girl from the
Arbor. Now recall what I said about the
Lannister son there, he said, Lauren Lannister's eldest son.
Well, remember what Tyrion's quote seems to indicate that
Lauren Lannister had no sons at the time of the Field of Fire.
But you know, Aegon's reign is 37 years long, so certainly kids
could have been born. And at this point it says Lauren
Lannister's eldest son. So there was at least two sons
by the time this marriage happened.
So this one was probably much later in the rain, probably not
during this one years, one to four, almost certainly much
later on. But the Winterfell Erie match
seems to have been early because Rainey's arranged it for one
thing. That's a clue, because Rainey's
isn't going to survive the the full reign of Aegon.
So that narrows down the timeline significantly.
So whenever Rainey's arranges a marriage, we know that it has to
have happened in the first decade.
But if the Senia marriage is arranges it, well, then the gap
is much wider. So now it was a big to do this
marriage between Stark and Aaron.
The Aaron's, as far as we know, didn't complain about it, at
least not until much later, and it might not have been related
at all. But Lord Toren, he did not like
the idea he was willing to bend the knee to Aegon, but this
whole marrying his daughter to the the veil he rejected.
He's like, no, I don't want to do this.
Somehow he was convinced and I really, really wonder what the
convincing was because it was very unpopular in Winterfell,
like it wasn't just him that was against it.
His sons didn't attend, and they were also upset about the whole
bending the knee thing. Which they were probably wrong
about, but that certainly seems to have fueled their anger over
this marriage because it's just more of more capitulation, more
giving in, more accepting foreign authority for in their
minds So. And they're young and, you know,
full of energy or whatever, and not very full of wisdom,
probably, But still, like, what could Rainey's have said, Like,
you know what? I don't think she gave them
anything. Like, we're going to give you
some money to accept this. I mean, maybe, but I don't know
what she could have possibly said to change his mind that
wasn't a veiled threat. You know, like what?
Do you have any ideas here, Sean?
Like, well, how do you convince someone this is like, I don't
want to do this but and you have nothing really to offer, but
except you're you do have authority over them.
Like it's tricky here. I've got a few ideas that maybe
she didn't directly give them money, but she might have not
taken more money. She might have said like, all
right, we're going to raise your taxes 5% then, for example,
right? Or she might have said, all
right, well, here's who we are going to marry him to then,
right? They might have.
She might have set up other marriages.
It would have been worse politically or strategically or
whatever for the North. I I think there's all kinds of
ways that she could have without even using direct violence made
things worse for the North. And there's a carrot and a
sticks like or if you do do this then you get this sort of
alliance. We give you this tax break.
We don't ask you to send troops to this war whatever, whatever.
I I can see all sorts of ways it would have added.
Also, I suspect he might not have been really that against
it. He just knew that other people
would and he kind of had to be against it for show to make his
sons happy. Maybe he knew he was going to
break down eventually anyway, if by.
Protesting. Maybe he gets something out of
it. Yeah.
It's like, well, yeah, if he just, if he just says yes, then,
you know, he gives up an opportunity to to to negotiate
and get get some sort of recompense.
That's a good. Yeah.
So that's pretty good. Now, again, come back to Ned and
Sansa. Ned was not excited about
marrying Sansa to Joffrey, not even, not because Joffrey's
Joffrey. He had no idea what kind of
personality Joffrey had. He just didn't want to marry her
to the throne at all. And meanwhile, Sansa was all for
it again. At the time, she didn't know
what she was getting into fully. But she's like, yeah, I want to
do that now. If you're a young Stark girl in
this new world of the Starks are no longer kings and Queens,
well, an errand marriage, if she's being realistic, she knows
she's going to get married to somebody.
They're going to make her marry somebody like, well, I'm getting
married to the veil, do a lot worse than that.
So maybe she was all for it, maybe not.
I don't know, like this is a completely imaginary person who
we know zero about their personality or even how old they
were. But if we're exploring the range
of options here, you can imagine that she would have at least
noticed that it could have been a lot worse.
Yeah, that. Not only is the Veil
prestigious, wealthy, whatever, but also they're closer to home.
Yeah, like you want to get married to someone from the Iron
Islands. Like, what are your That's
another thing that they might have just discussed.
Like, like you said, you know you're getting married
eventually. Who?
What are your options? Who do you think it's going to
be? Let's run through them.
What are the pros and cons like this one we're proposing is the
best one anyway, right? And Torrent could see this even
though it upsets his sons. Not to mention, like you said,
he could get some angle from the negotiation.
He she might have other veiled threats in there, or ways to
manipulate things to make it better or worse for him.
But just the other potential candidates just running through
the list might have been enough to convince him so.
Yeah, that's true. That's very true.
Now, as similar as it might seem on the surface, meaning the
marriages and fosterings is something that we're all very
familiar with. Is actually a huge difference in
after the conquest versus before, especially for great
houses. Let's talk about them
individually first, marriages. OK.
If you're a Lannister Princess and you marry a rain house, rain
lordling, that's no big deal. Sure, there's exceptions like
Tywin, but they're extremely rare.
You don't go against your king except in extreme circumstances,
in part because they're almost always far more powerful than
you. So you need a lot of help to to
even consider doing so. And in the case of the West,
Catholic Rock is just overwhelming in terms of its its
its position as a holder of power and wealth.
It's just so hard to take on Cassidy Rock if a Lannister
Princess married a Prince of the Reach.
Now this could be really good for peace between those two
regions, right? Remember, this is pre conquest
we're talking about, but it can be awkward because war between
the Reach and the Rock was not uncommon.
So what if you're that Princess? Your family is now the enemy,
the family you just came from. It's not great for your husband
and children either, of course, because your husband is caught
between two worlds. Your children are of that other
family too. Again, we come back to Sansa.
In her case, she was not technically yet married to
Joffrey, so that helped her get out of the situation, but it was
still very much the same. Like, she's at court at first,
she's proud to be there and everyone's happy to have her
there for the most part. But then all of a sudden her
family is viewed as traitors and she's like, everyone's like
looking at her funny and no one wants to talk to her, 'cause
they don't want to be associated with treason.
And Joffrey's picking on her even worse than he was before,
abusing her worse than he was before.
It's not like Cersei's being very nice either, so it just
really flipped on its head. And that's was one of many
things that went bad for Sansa at court.
So using her as an example, this would have happened many times
in the history of the Seven Kingdoms.
On a smaller scale without an Iron Throne it can still happen
like these pre kind of marriage. A Highgarden Rock marriage.
Well, the house Rain isn't very likely to try to take on Castley
Rock, but Highgarden might. So these wars aren't like
stymied by the fact that it would be insane to do it
Highgarden. It's not insane for Highgarden
to go to war with the Rock, but it might be insane for for house
Rain to do so. So yeah.
A little bit of a tangent, but I do want to point out a lot of
times these marriages are sort of like the fosterings that yes,
they're a hostage, they're really a hostage, you know?
They kind of are. Hopefully you fall in love,
Hopefully it maintains peace, but it's what it sort of comes
down to. Especially during the betrothal
phase, once the marriage actually happens and once
there's children in the mix, it's it's it's harder to
consider that you know, you're you're killing your own people
at that point. If you execute a girl that has
already fathered children in your dynasty, that's you can't
go that that's that's too far at that point.
But you're right before that that phase like the phase answer
was in when it wasn't too late then there's a lot of risk
you're right and and it is more of a hostage situation so and
it's not also it's not like marriages from one Kingdom to
another were common anyway in the in the era of pre conquest.
It's not like Kings of the Rock married their daughters to
Princess of Highgarden very often.
But it it would have happened sometimes.
But now it started happening often because the Targaryens
were making it happen. They were forcing it to happen.
They were like, you don't have a choice.
Just like if the Kings of Highgarden were like, OK, House
Oakhart, you're marrying House Hightower.
They were like, Yep, all right, that's what we're doing.
And they might protest and like, like the Starks did to get a
little negotiating room, but ultimately they're going to
pretty much have to do it. And same thing is true here.
The Targaryens are going to make you do it.
You might not want to say no, but there's a lot less risk
because it's like an S It's like an escrow situation where your
son and your daughter, the son and the daughter are both held
by the king and the queen, not by the other house.
Like, you either have the Lannister girl at hostage at
Highgarden or vice versa, but here they're both at the well.
I was going to say the Red keep the Aegon Fort, and that means
neither side has them as a hostage.
The King has them as a hostage, which he's unlikely to execute
either of them because it's not really in his best interest.
So they both can feel a lot safer with that arrangement than
they could have in the Seven Kingdoms era.
Because there's not this awkwardness of constant border
skirmishes and and minor wars that break out where these
families get put in awkward positions as vis A vis their
prior connections. Instead it's all done under the
auspices of House Targaryen which guarantees the peace
between both sides because again of their Dragons, mostly because
the Dragons other things too. But that's the big one.
Fostering's, it's very simple. Well, it's just huge that it can
build important relationships. So the relationships generally
won't be as strong as a marriage, but sometimes they're
close. Robert and Ned were great
friends. They weren't as close as
spouses, but they were pretty big friendship there, Pretty
important. You could argue that
relationship was closer than a lot of marriages.
Like maybe? Yeah.
Ned did abandoned his home and family to go down to King's
Landing and put his life and other people's life on the line
to try to do what he thought was right for Robert.
You know, it was it's hard to get much stronger than what he
was doing. Yeah, yeah.
I think it was probably more more for Ned than for Robert.
Although to be fair, it was Catelyn's idea for Ned to go in
the book and Ned's in the show that that's one thing that gets
confusing because it's reversed. But either way, you're right.
I mean that's you're you're right either way.
It was strong enough that Robert expected him to go, even if it
turned out to be Caitlin pushing it.
Robert took his whole court to the North to visit his old war.
But. Yeah, that's true.
I mean, and look at some of the examples of fostering that just
have a huge impact on the character in both positive and
negative ways. Theon, I mean huge example
there. I mean Theon's a massive
example, maybe even the biggest because it plays out, we see it,
some of it play out in front of us, whereas Ned and Roberts a
big one. But that's all in the past.
We don't see it play out, we just see the effect of it.
We see it 1520 years later, Jamie.
We get a little of both because we see in his POV, we see some
of his thoughts on that, like flashbacks to when he was a page
and a Squire and is now in a position to have many pages and
Squires of his own who were sent to him by a lot of houses that
want to get in good with the Lannisters.
So think about that, How many houses are trying to get in good
with the Lannisters now that they're the kings and Queens,
right now that they're the royal house?
Well, this would have been the same scenario here with Aegon
and Visenia and Rainey's, where they're like a lot of houses are
like eager to send their young kids to get in good with the new
regime. It's not just like we better do
this or we're going to be in trouble.
No, it's like we should do this. It's good for us.
Or at least it's good for this of our this one child of ours.
It's another carrot stick type thing, yes.
And you would rather anyone wise enough to see it that way would
be like, well, I would rather have the carrot, you know.
It's not good for my pride necessarily but the but the
carrot beats the stick every time.
If you're faced with it, if you have your way with all the.
Carrot, actually. Good point.
Yeah, the stick is the one that beats.
You're right. Yeah, I gotta Carrots are for
eating, Sticks are for beating, eating, beating you.
You see, it's an easy mistake to make.
I don't know how you handle your carrot, but you.
Beat your carrot. Well, getting into euphemisms
here, Dang, where is this going? So now and then compare to Danny
again, we're we're back to Danny and Maureen, who also has lots
of maybe not pages and Squires, but lots of cup bearers and
handmaidens and stuff like that. Here's a quote.
We must keep them safe as well. I will have two children from
each of them from the other pyramids as well, a boy and a
girl. Hostages.
Said Shakaz happily. Pages and cup bearers, If the
great masters make objection, explain to them that in Westeros
it is a great honor for a child to be chosen to serve at court.
Yep, it's that is a that is a major parallel right there.
Except for that. The difference would be that a
lot of the great masters would make wouldn't be as excited
about this as a lot of the Lords and ladies of Westeros would be
like. Oh, opportunity.
Great masters are like, I don't know if this is opportunity or
not. Some of them might see it that
way, but others are like, we're all working to overthrow this
lady, so we might not want our children there when this all
goes down. So maybe we don't want our kids
there. But the Lords of Westeros, for
the most part, aren't planning rebellion.
But some of those, you're right. Some of those great masters
might realize that, oh hey, I'm trying to set up a marriage for
my young son, and maybe he can meet someone and make a
connection. Or they might see that they can
mingle. I feel like the lesser houses
would be to them, they'd see it as an opportunity to move up on
the ladder, whereas the the ones with the most to lose and
nowhere to go up would be the ones that would be resistant.
To follow that up, the latter thing we were talking earlier
and another, I don't know, contrast between Danny and Aegon
is that he built a bunch of new ladders and the ladders that
were there before got higher than they were before.
Yeah, Danny is just like one new ladder.
This might be a little bit higher maybe, right.
Some ladders got knocked down like it's a it's not as clear
and obvious. All these benefits that you're
going to get from getting in good with Danny, as it was with
Aegon. That's a great point because
Aegon was there to stay, whereas they they kind of know Danny is
going to leave eventually for Westeros, right?
So there's that. And even if she was going to.
Stay. She knows she's going to leave
eventually, right? Like, it's not like they're
saying something that she's not going to agree with.
True. That's true.
And and even if she was going to stay, she's staying in this
place that, at least in a short term, is getting kind of torn
down, right, Like, and I think it's worth it for the morality
and in the long run will probably be bigger.
But in Westeros, things are clearly better immediately.
Like there's this whole new city being built.
There's peace all around. He he's investing.
He's there's all these new good, positive things from almost
every angle are happening. Whereas for Danny, it's it's
just turmoil. It's just turmoil and people
resisting. And she hasn't brought this
whole new advancement of their society or peace.
They had peace all right. You know what I mean?
It's a but for the people in charge that are going to be the
nobles, getting kids or whatever.
For the average person it might be better, but even for them it
wasn't clearly obviously better. So.
She's in a much tougher scenario in a million different.
Ways I agree it's it's there are a lot of parallels, but there's
also a lot of differences. The Dragons are not that large.
They're not that intimidating. So they're the slavers aren't as
worried about that. You're right as well that I
think I'd say that Slavers Bay is a lot more corrupt then
Westeros. Plenty of things wrong with
Westeros. We've criticized plenty of
social institutions. You can criticize plenty of
cultural attitudes, but I think you could.
I think most people look at Marine as worse just for the
just because of slavery, which is a fair estimation in my
opinion. So yeah, it's a lot, lot bigger
a difference. And to give Danny credit,
because it's some of this might sound like she's messing up.
And, you know, maybe she is. But my point is that she has
this difficult righteous goal, which maybe Aegon had two, but
his goal basically is to like unite this land for the sake of
future prosperity, where her goal is to end slavery.
And I think her goal is tougher. Does that make sense?
I think it's more important and more tough, right?
I. Absolutely agree with that.
Yeah. And and you can see like in this
lesson of Danny gets us back to Aegon and why he was maybe
cautious of not that he learned from her, obviously, but he saw
into the future and saw Denny's troubles in Marine was like, you
know what, I'm going to handle Westeros differently now.
He didn't want to make change too many things too quickly.
And like, you know, one of those examples of them was like he
maybe he should have changed first night like as quickly as
possible, because that is an ugly, ugly institution.
It was addressed later, but he was more concerned about things
that would start wars. And as bad as first night is,
it's probably not going to start any wars.
It's just just a really awful thing that happens to peasants.
But I don't think it's ever started a war.
So that's probably why he put it on a on a lower rung of
priority. The all the overall point is
he's not trying to rock the boat now.
Danny is rocking the boat as a lot because there's bigger
problems there. There's more reforming that's
needed like you said And yeah, as aggressive as he Egon was on
the battlefield, he was not as aggressive.
It was more of a soft, he was more soft power like do what we
want or else. But he's not.
He's relying on them not to test the OR else.
And for the most part they don't.
Whereas in Danny they do. They they call her bluff on the
children hostages. She's like, Danny's not going to
kill these children. We can, we can make a move and
she will decide not to kill these children because she's
Danny and they were right. She they they break some of the
deals and she's like, yeah, I'm not killing these children.
So Danny probably should have handled that different in the
1st place, but that's that's another story.
But good on her for not killing children, obviously.
I also, I'm pretty sure that first night wasn't as pervasive
as a problem. That's.
That's true. It was way more slavery than the
first night. Yeah, that's very.
True as well. You're right.
Like yeah first night was sort of kept on the down low even
when it was allowed and and slavery is the policy of their
government like the main like their their their the harpy
carries chains. You know, it's like shackles.
It's it's it couldn't be more blatant than that.
But it wasn't just marriages of the Great Houses.
Vicenia and Rainey's were making marriages for other ranking
houses and even people who didn't have much rank at all
quote. When three girls triplets were
born to the even star of Tarth, Queen Rainey's arranged
betrothals for them with House Corbray, House Hightower, and
House Harlow. Queen Vicenia brokered a double
wedding between House Blackwood and House Bracken, rivals whose
history of enmity went back centuries, matching a son of
each house with a daughter of the other to seal a piece
between them. And when a Rowan girl in
Rainey's service found herself with child by a Scullion, the
queen found a knight to marry her in White Harbor and another
in Lanisport who was willing to take on her bastard as a foster
leg. So it should follow as well that
while houses like the Starks and the Lannisters, the Great Houses
have some ability to object to these marriage negotiations or
to at least use get a little leverage through their objection
because their objection won't hold.
These lesser houses don't really have much say here at all.
They're just like, Yep, OK, well we're we're doing what you say.
The wording makes it sound like those Tarth triplets were
betrothed. Like right away it says when
three girls were born. You would think actually those
patrols would come later when they're a little older, but
maybe not. Maybe they're just like jumping
all over this, like getting ahead of it.
And if that's the case, then it really implies a lot of
aggression here, really, in making these matches, like they
were finding any unmarried children, no matter how young
they were, and making betrothed. Those are marriages and just
doing as much as possible. But it it could be an unintended
meaning the way that sentence was written and maybe these
girls were betrothed at a more typical age.
Looking at the choices, though, it's not exactly equal outcome
for these triplets, right? One girl has to go to Harlow and
she's probably like, really? I got to go to the Iron Islands
while one of my sisters gets to go to the Hightower?
Come on, that's not fair. But yeah, her family might not
have been happy with it either, but again, they have little they
could do about it. Now, it's possible the Ironborn
had a little more prestige than we think of because of Heron and
his ancestors had so recently been so dominant.
But in general, people look down on the Iron Isles.
Harlot, to be fair, is the richest of all the Iron Isles,
of all the all the houses in in the Iron Isles, perhaps, but it
would still be remote. Especially, or maybe not to a
person born on Tarth, since they're both islands, but that's
the other side of Westeros. You know, an island on one on
the east versus an island on the West.
Despite the incongruity of Hightower versus Harla, it's yet
another high tower marriage. So that's interesting.
And Corbray? That's a perfectly promulent
match on paper, I suppose. Hopefully she didn't get someone
like Lynn Corbray, though as a as a husband, that wouldn't be
great. If the girls were older, they
may have had some choice. Like which of them got to do
which like they? They drew shark strong, was
intrigued by pirates and wanted to go to the Iron Islands or
something like. That that's true, maybe, you
never know. And I I wonder too if it was
like A and opportunity they jumped on because it was
triplets. You know if they're if they're
like we have these three houses, we need to find some triplets,
that's it. Perfect.
You know, or. It is a very unusual thing.
Triplets. Yeah, like that's that's.
Also unusual that this is like pointed out to us, this is an
anecdote that's included in the history.
So I, I, I, I do kind of think it's like you're saying is to
demonstrate the aggressiveness they were they had with these
marriage arrangements. Also, of course, this Bracken
Blackwood marriage is very notable now.
It's one made by Vicinia, so it's potentially much later in
Aegon's reign, but it's very important, so let's look at it.
Regardless of when it happened, it would have a similar effect.
Now we need to look back at some recent history in the Riverlands
to set the stage here with this context.
The Brackens and Blackwoods, of course, had gone to war many
times in history, but it there had been one fairly recently,
just before the Conquest, less than a decade before the
Conquest. Now, normally they'd have been
allowed to go at it, just go ahead and fight each other.
But they went too far. They were a bit foolish with it.
Go figure. A war went too far.
That never happens, right? But they disturbed their legs.
Lord's plan specifically, they caused a delay in the building
of hair and all. That's a no, no.
Hair in the black would have not would have normally.
Just, yeah, go ahead and fight each other.
I don't care. But because their war
interrupted the building of Heron Hall, he got very upset
and he had been waiting a while. Remember, it took four decades
to make that castle and this was past the three decade mark.
He might have been a bit anxious about getting it done before he
died of old age or something like that.
Now the real irony to the completion of Heron Hall, of
course, is much more brutal. But I digress.
King Heron put a stop to the Blackwood Bracken war and
punished them both further. Which we're not told what that
punishment meant, but it was probably violent and and strong
and heavy-handed. Perhaps this along with the
losses suffered from them fighting each other, which
apparently got out of hand because it was pretty violent,
maybe more so than a usual conflict between Bracket and
Blackwood. So they both fell back into a
time of loss of precede, like they were recovering from this
double whammy of fighting each other and getting punished by
King Heron. This is a big part of why, if
you recall, the Tullys were at the forefront when the
opportunity to switch to King Aegon over King Heron came along
because those two usual suspects, suspects, suspects,
the Brackens and Blackwoods lacked their usual strength in
order to, you know, they had to sit back.
Of course neither Bracken nor Blackwood took casualties during
the conquest because of this. So that was the the good side of
that for them. So by the time this interim
phase that we're focusing on today came around, they had
probably recovered like a whole nother generation of of people
would have been born by then and and the young men would have
grown up and the young women would have grown up.
And again this marriage could have happened like 33 AC or
something. It could happen much later let
down the line. So the Brackens and Blackwoods
would have both had numerous famous figure.
Rather they have over time had many famous figures at court
over the years, like, you know, Bitter Steel and Bloodraven.
Of course those come along much later, but there were people
earlier than that too. Maybe Vicenia's marriage, which
was again a double marriage, one son from each house, one
daughter from each house, might have helped set up.
It might have even been made between individuals who were
already at court. You may have been like Vicenia
may have seen them day-to-day here and there and then like,
you know what these, these these people, these brackets of Black
Wiz are always arguing. They're always fighting.
I know, let's make them marry. That'll, that'll put a stop to
that. And you wonder like where the
brackens and black ones at court like, were they fighting each
other? Were they like not associate?
Were they just keeping their distance?
So it'd be interesting to see how they behaved in a neutral
but highly controlled environment, like like court.
That's what I was going to say, that this younger generation,
you know, we don't exactly know how young they were, but they
probably weren't 30 years old, you know, whether than that they
were 7 or 17, but they still were removed from the biases
that they would have had at home.
They would have gotten to know the people from the other houses
for who they were, not for what their house was.
And they maybe hadn't been told the stories or or as many of the
stories or whatever stories they have been told might not be
enough to overcome the personal connection they have with the
other individual standing in front of it.
That's a good point. It would be a good way.
Especially, there may be a more extreme example, Bracks and
Blackwood's. But all these people at court,
or getting this opportunity to meet each other's people without
all these biases of their houses and their histories, which is
Aegon's intention, right? He's trying to Hey, we're all
from Westeros, not the Stormlands or the Brackens or
whatever. And you're right and that's
that's really important because and it's again I repeat that
it's at a neutral location. They're not like all they're not
at the court of of Highgarden where the bias is pretty tilted
towards reach culture and favoring the reach and etcetera.
So this is yeah this is a neutral new spot and that's
really important a Bracken Knight would some 40 plus years
later. So join Magar Magor's
Kingsguard. Let's not forget that's
Vesenia's son and the white cloaks were her creation.
So there's another kind of tie in here.
Then again, that same Bracken Knight would again eventually
flip to Jarry's, but so did a lot of people.
And then again, again, another Bracken would fight against
Megor in his famous trial by 7 at the beginning of his reign.
So yeah, the brackets are just popping up all over.
That's how they do. They're a big house.
Speaking of children and marriages, let's think of and
and of Megor. And there's the OFT repeated
note that Aegon spent ten nights with Rainey's for everyone with
Vicenya. I would guess that became a
thing of note because so much depended on whatever children
were produced from one or both of the royal unions.
We talked about this a while ago, and the tension and the
anxiety would just be building with every year that passed
without any sort of issue whatsoever from this royal
house, no kids. That's going to make people
nervous. Like, as amazing as this new
regime was shaping up and all the opportunities it was
creating, there's there's got to be some sense of this.
Could all fall apart if. They don't have someone to pass
it down to. That is a clear choice.
If there's any doubt in the succession, which there
definitely will be, if there's no kids at all, it could turn,
it could all just go belly up. And all this, this new peace
could turn into a massive, continent wide civil.
War. One option they might have had,
However much people thought about this, is they could rather
than like pass the throne on to someone, they get to pass the
Dragons on to someone. And that might not be so easy
either. They might not be able to pick
the person they think will be a wise leader and then also have
that person bond with the dragon.
That might not be so easily said than done, but everyone doesn't
necessarily understand that. So I I wonder if that tempered
the concern about whether or not there was an error with a a
little bit of maybe the air doesn't matter, it's who gets
the Dragons that matters. Yeah, that's a good point that
that would be on their minds too.
They'd be like, well, who who's going to be able to ride these
Dragons, especially Bulerian, you know, what's the, what's
going to happen there? And then there were there would
have been some new Dragons being born around this time and just
before as well. So even though those Dragons
might not be immediately an issue, you could look for where
people could think ahead 10 to 20 years and be like, well, that
dragon will be an issue later. Almost like a a bastard child or
something like that might be an issue.
One day a baby dragon might be an issue 1.
Day, yeah, Looking into the minutiae of this.
And we're going to take another look at this later as well.
There'll be a lot of times that this comes up because it's such
an important thing, especially with some of the chicanery.
Some of the trickery that might have gone in the background is
like, which queen do you like ingratiate yourself with?
If you're going to do either because who's going to have a
son first? You're like, well, the one that
has a son first is probably going to raise and rise and
prestige. And if one has a son and one has
a daughter, it's pretty obvious those two are going to get
married, though maybe not. But it would have been an
obvious possibility I guess was. So there might be a little
competition there. We don't hear about it.
There's no like, oh, Rainy's been here racing to have a kid
first. But it it's, it can't have not
entered their minds. It can not have been something
that occurred to them, and it certainly occurred to other
people like and Rainey's was said to surround herself with
handsome young men, including in her bed chambers, which is like
well, that's suspicious. There's a few ways to interpret
Rainey's having handsome young men in her bed chambers.
The 1st is just that, there's nothing to see here, that she
wasn't sleeping with them, so nothing happened at all.
Maybe she did sleep with one or more of them but didn't get
pregnant, so it's doesn't matter.
The big possibility though, is that Anies the son she bears
eventually, and there's also a possibility that Megor wasn't
Aegon's. I did.
I wrote a video for Indie Geek on that.
This possibility, whether Aegon was potentially sterile or
something like that, and how it's very possible.
Now if it's true that Rainey's was trying to create a child and
to create an heir through a different man and be able to
say, hey this is Aegon's child, you know, to get pregnant and be
able to claim it's Aegon's heir, it's a huge risk if you're
sleeping with brown haired people, right?
It's not like like Ranira was sort of able to get away with
it. I mean she didn't really get
away with it, but she sort of was able to get away with it
because she had brown haired ancestors on her mother's side.
So it wasn't completely out of the the realm of possibly that
didn't really exist here. Ranis did not have brown haired
ancestors that we know of so there would be no way to explain
it at all. It would be like, I don't know,
this kid just has brown hair. It just happened.
It's just random, you know, so it would be very suspicious.
Much harder to explain. So Rainey's probably isn't dumb
enough to to take that risk. It's entirely possible she was
surrounding herself with silver haired, young handsome young men
though, which would both increase the suspicion and make
it more possible that she got pregnant with one of them and
these rumors. This is an hour rumor.
This is an in world rumor that existed that she might have been
sleeping, she might have been sleeping around with some of
these men. These rumors started before the
conquest, but they would have mattered more after 'cause there
would be a lot more spotlight on the Queens and and Aegon in
general. And as I said, the situation of
the lack of heirs would just keep getting more and more tense
and more notable. So whoever the queen is spending
her time with is going to put more eyes on the situation.
There's more at stake, right? So yeah, so that's a really
interesting situation that if there's ever ATV show for this
era, it would be a big deal because they'd have to show this
tension between the Queens and it.
It would be a little bit similar in some ways to the Dance of the
Dragons, but like earlier in that phase, because when the
dance starts, when the TV show starts, you know, Viserys
already has children. So yeah, it would build up.
So many other factors that could be involved there too, because
it could be that one of the Queens didn't want to have kids,
didn't want the attention, or wasn't attracted to Aegon.
Or you could just imagine the infinite different ways that you
know it might not have been contentious between the Queens
and and another thought I had too is like if some people were
like trying to get in good with one queen or the other.
Say you chose the wrong queen and the other one has a child
and they up in prestige. Well, OK, so I'm in good with
the third most powerful person instead of the second most
powerful person. You're still not so bad.
You're still doing all right? Yeah, it's.
Not like they're going to go to war with each other.
Their descendants will, but you know, they didn't.
Hopefully, yeah. So here's a a great thorough
both theory slash idea from frequent listener, occasional
commenter Cat Ovivis, who is a real life gynecologist and has
some ideas, like I said on this this situation here with the
lack of children and what she calls genetic peculiarities, Now
we know, and she acknowledges in the second sentence of this, of
this letter that she sent us that real world genetics.
You can't just strictly take those as what's happening here.
They're clearly not happening here because the Targaryen
family line is been incestuous to a greater degree than pretty
much anything in the real world. And there's magic in there.
We know there's magic in there, so it can't be strictly taken as
a one to one relationship. Nevertheless, there are
similarities to real world incest that happens in the
Targaryen family tree, such as the proneness of stillborn
children. The frequency of infertility,
the fact that some of these just don't have kids, and Aegon is a
potential example here. And she says in real world
intermarriages between close relatives, that enhances the
risk of genetic diseases. And if a family carries a gene
causing severe disease or malformations, each child born
with that disease, there will be several who carry the gene and
die in early pregnancy. It happens really often.
And this was news to me and probably tell them a lot of you
out there, women have pregnancies that are self
aborted by the body. Early on they did.
The pregnancy isn't viable. It ends so early that the woman
doesn't even know she was pregnant in the first place.
In many cases, these families seem to be to the outside world
to be suffering from low fertility.
And yeah, so if we apply this to the dragon gene, it would mean
that some of these sister, brother marriages would have a
higher risk of miscarriage and infertility, which we are
seeing. We are seeing that and have seen
in fact the Targaryens before, Aegon, the family tree is bare.
There's very few children, they were like barely keeping it
going, and there's like very few women on the in the tree at all,
and they had several generations of inbreeding that might not
have happened back in the freehold.
The freehold would have been, it would have been inbreeding, but
it would have been inbreeding from a larger pool.
It would have been the 40 dragon rider families inbreeding
incessantly, which is a much larger pool. 40 families is a
much larger pool than one family, right?
Like that makes a huge difference.
Even though it's still going to be incestuous, even though it's
still going to be some danger there, it will be greatly
lessened. Now they're all reduced to just
marrying within themselves, which is just a tiny genetic
pool. And that's a problem.
I did some research. I did a panel and I said fire
con on incest and I've forgotten some of the specific numbers.
But, but you know, there's some percentage chance for some
certain defects to be passed. And that when you have, when you
have a a 1° of separation like a brother and a sister or a father
and a daughter, something like that, it's exponential that that
of that happening even still it's like 3%.
But if you do that two or three times in a row, all of a sudden
it's like 70%, right? But if you go one branch away
just to a cousin, it's cut in half, One branch away is cut in
half again. And so when you have 40
families, even you're far enough branches, you're cutting in half
so much and so often that it doesn't get past like the 1%
point, you know. But if you just do it for three
or four generations in a row, then it's becomes like a
guarantee that you're going to pass these on these genetic
flaws, which sometimes there's something like a cuff lip, but
sometimes it's like something that keeps a child from being
born. So yeah, and that does add up
here. It adds up what Cat Ovivas is
saying does add up pretty well here because what happens is you
have take prior to the doom. Let's say you have a bunch of
they're doing their thing, they have marriages to families the
size that it is and they're presumably marrying sometimes
within the family, sometimes to other dragon rider families.
They move to Westeros and all of a sudden their birth rate drops
dramatically until Aegon and his two sisters are born.
But their mother was a valarian, was not a Targaryen.
So it's like all of a sudden they do have a decent sized
family. Three kids come from that union,
and then two kids come from 2 marriages to Aegon only.
And even the both of those babies are a little suspicious,
right? At least one or both of them
might not have been fathered by Aegon.
And then what happens? A niece marries Alyssa Valarian,
another Valarian, and they have a lot of kids.
So it's like as soon as another person that's not a Targaryen is
brought into it, it's a bunch of kids are born.
So it's like yeah like this isn't proof but it's strong
evidence and it's and for our possibility of our purposes it
it fits extremely well. And so I I like this idea I've
been I've kind of been in on this theory a little bit before
but it it seems to carry more weight when we've got someone
that's an expert bringing in the theory and acknowledging the
magical elements as well. So a great theory cat Ovivis.
I like it. It it builds on the existing
body of theories that are here on this topic and it works
really well. I think it does work really
well. Also, there's the possibility
that there was magic, blood magic being used in Valyria to
offset some of these issues Like, OK, yes, we can't fix the
genes perfectly, but we can, you know, immunize you against the
worst effects of it, like magical immunization against the
effects of incest. Whatever these blood magicians
were able to do, it's whatever they're doing.
They had, you know, 58000 years to figure it out.
So they kept that society going for a long time despite the the
inbreeding. So they they, they had other
answers to these problems. I think that maybe they they
they lost some of that, some of the ways to mitigate those
problems. Or maybe they didn't fully
understand them. Maybe they maybe the problems
were coming back in ways that they figured these things out
thousands of years ago in Valyria and then they lost that
knowledge, 'cause it wasn't important.
They were the 40 families were providing enough genetic
material to not have to for not to be a problem.
And then they're like, whoa, this problem has come and they
didn't know what to do about it, 'cause the last time it had been
dealt with was thousands of years ago, and the books that
were all written on it were long destroyed in The Doom.
Something like that. Good idea.
All right, Our last little section for today is our build
up to Dorne. Yes?
Though Maria had rejected Rainey's out of hand.
As I mentioned earlier in the episode, there were attempts to
bring Dorne into the realm via peaceful negotiation.
Quote. With this mission of the Three
Sisters and the Iron Islands, all of Westeros South of the
Wall, was now ruled by Aegon Targaryen, save Dorn alone.
So it was to Dorn that the Dragon next turned his
attention. Aegon first attempted to win the
Dornishman with words, dispatching a delegation of high
Lords, maesters and septons to Sunspear to treat with Princess
Maria Martel, the so-called Yellow Toad of Dorn, and
persuade her of the advantages of joining her realm to his.
Then negotiations continued for the best part of a year had
achieved nothing. So real quick, the timeline
here, it's not exactly clear when this began, but it says as
soon as he, you know, turned as he turned his attention to Dorne
after the Three Sisters in the Island Islands were taken care
of, which was around the second year.
So he probably started back with these negotiations near the end
of AC2. So this where it says the
negotiation continued for the best part of the year.
That would probably be most of AC-3.
And the eventual opening of hostilities happened in AC4.
So it all it all adds up pretty well.
Maria was in her 80s, overweight, blind.
She didn't paint a picture of health.
He would never admit to it, Aegon I mean.
But perhaps he was hoping Maria would just die, and then he
would be negotiating with her heir, who might be a lot less
stubborn, who might at least at least have a different attitude.
Because this clearly wasn't getting anywhere.
And again, just like it was with Tauren and the Lord of the Vale
and the arranging of a marriage between their children.
Or the Lord of the Vale and his child, rather, to be specific.
What were they offering here? What were they?
What are the advantages of joining their realm?
Again, it feels like there's a lot of negative reinforcement
here. It's like not submitting to us
means war. You know, You may be stubborn,
but we've got Dragons, you know. What is the what's the
negotiation here? How diplomatic was Aegon?
How was he? That that being like we're
coming for you probably didn't work.
So he might have tried a different tactic.
Like tying your realm to ours means greater trade, greater
like you, your people on. Here's one that comes to mind.
If you join our realm, your long standing grievances and wars
with the Reach and Stormlands will will stop.
Like that'll end you'll over time.
It won't happen right away but over time this this long running
feud will turn into a a maybe even a good place where goods
and ideas are exchanged. I mean we still aren't to that
in this day. But it's things are way better
between Dorne and the reach and the storm winds and they they
were in this era. So clearly over time it did get
a lot better. Maybe that's part of his pitch
like look to have this is this is good for the long term.
It's not about my ego. It's not about yours.
This is good for Dorne. You know, For these reasons, she
doesn't agree. That's her right and she might
be right, but. On that one, she might not have
agreed because what he's seeing as a positive would, I think I
and most rational people see as positive.
She or some of her people might not have.
She doesn't want peace with him. She wants the exact vengeance on
them for the cousin they killed last year or whatever, you know,
like that's been an ongoing feud.
She might not want that to end. Yeah, she might not want to be.
She might not will be willing to accept the realm if like the
Reach wasn't in it, or something like that.
Or now the Stormlands were taken over by an entirely new person.
So that's they don't necessarily have the same level of grudge
there, although they would have many individual grudges against
lesser houses, perhaps especially the Marcher houses,
if not Storm's End because it's now Oris Baratheons.
But I mean the Dornish aren't, they're just not the type to
give in easily. That's the something we've
learned over many centuries, many examples of that.
And so there are examples that aren't just negative
reinforcement. There's there's potential.
But, and I imagine since the negotiations took place over the
course of a year, Aegon may have tried all these different
tactics. He's like, OK, let's try the
stick. Let's try the carrot.
Let's try the carrot stick. You know, a stick you can eat,
right? That's the somewhere in between.
Let's try. Yeah, offering this and that.
There wouldn't have been. I wonder if there were marriage
offers. But, you know, if he had a kid
to marry to them, that would have maybe made it easier,
'cause that is what it took in the long term, right?
It took a marriage to get darn into the realm, or a double
marriage. And yeah, Aegon's potential
sterility or partial sterility may have sort of tanked this
possibility and LED to, yeah, well, led to war.
But Aegon just might not have been willing to do that.
It's it's an assumption that Aegon, even if he had children,
would have been willing to marry them to the Martel's.
He might not have been willing to do that.
I think he probably would have though to to avoid having to
just just annihilate Dorne. If he could see the future, he
would have, right? If he knew how things were going
to pan out, he definitely. Oh yes, unquestionably yes,
because. I wonder though if the yellow
toad would have, if she knew how it was going to play out, if she
might have still been so stubborn to not do.
It, I wonder. Well, she is going to see the
entire war despite her. I mean, despite being in the
80s, her 80s. Why not C?
Because she's blind. She's going to live through it
all. She saw how it played out.
She'd see it. Dorne got the best of them.
Well. Like, don't.
They like they a lot of people were killed.
I mean, cities were destroyed, right?
They're of all the different realms, Dorne is the one that
they're still Princess. They're in.
The long run, I guess you're. Probably run.
I think it worked out for them. Yeah yeah the short term was
awful because they as it's as it's going to say I don't have
the quote in front of me but something like nearly every
castle in Dorne was was just was burned and it's just that's
awful but and and like they starved for a long they had they
had starvation and and food issues for a while after that
but but you but they kept. Their some of the things they
got in the long run they might have gotten anyway if they had
submitted. Like some of those people that
were killed might have been leaders and warriors and
diplomats and traitors that would have convinced Aegon to
give them more autonomy or to change their way of life.
Or it's hard to know what all those killed people might have
done if they weren't killed you. Know you're right.
Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a giant.
What if you can't? Really?
What if with certainty, when there's so many lives involved
and so many scenarios would have been dramatically different?
But yeah, I can. I definitely see a Saya's point.
Yeah, if the yellow toad or or a leader's goal was to preserve
their people's culture, then, you know, maybe she, quote UN
quote, won. But I think that's not as an
important goal, is not letting your innocent people be killed.
Yeah, yeah. It's a tough, it's a tough
decision. A decade, you know.
Because you can't predict how much of that will happen.
You can't predict, like they didn't know that it would work
out in the long run. You know it did.
It did in terms of their independence, as Ashaya says,
but they didn't. They don't know that it that
it's going to happen. But yeah, I mean, their words
are unbound, unbound and broken. That's what she said to
Rainey's. That's their cultural attitude.
They're going to back. They're going to stand by that
and well and so the so are the Targaryens going to stand by
their fire and blood. And that's why this war is going
to be really brutal, really nasty and and Despite that,
very, very interesting because it's not just a war of battles
and armies. It's a war of subterfuge, of
assassinations, of intrigue and and lots of things that we see
less of in other wars. And it's such a long war.
We don't see much of that either.
We don't see a lot of really, really long wars in Westeros,
partly because of the the weather situation.
You know, the fact that it's you might have winter for several
years, which is like, well, are we really going to have war
during three years of winter? I mean you might because it's
Dorne and then and where the weather is better, where the
winter doesn't hit as hard, but they don't exactly have robust
food growth down there either as compared to some other regions.
So it's not all just roses to use a reference that's more
appropriate for the Tyrells, but still you get my meaning.
So that's where we're headed with our next episode.
It will, it'll probably take us more than one episode to get
through the war since it's so long and because non war things
are happening during it. It's not all war.
That's just a the. The spotlight is on that.
So that'll be next week. All right.
We've got some patrons to give a shout out to Sean.
Take it away and. As always, I'll do a a few new
and a few old Galbi of Sirwin the Pale Blade.
Like that one. This is a long one.
Get ready for this Brandon Brewer of Castle Black, Rune
Sworn Ailesmith to Hal Stark, Grandmaster of Zythomancers
Guild and Keeper of the Buzz. Yeah, I see.
I used to know what Zithomancer meant, but I imagine it's
something to do with brewing. I don't know.
That makes sense. Yeah.
I. Looked it up, but I've forgotten
what it meant. Captain Lewis, the merchant
Prince. When men see his sales, they
pay. That's sales.
SALES like a salesman. So yes, good pun there.
I love that one. I remember laughing out loud
when he sent that one to us. Yes, Zitho is the Greek word for
beer. Oh, Zitho.
OK, we knock back a tall glass of Zitho.
All right, we've got Lady Peg of House of Bundy.
Married with children referenced there.
Chara of House Krypton. I hope that's a Superman
reference. And Lord Kissel of Kissington.
I like a name with a lot of ZS. Me, my own name being 50% Z
myself your. Self.
My myself, yes. But you can find all these
patron names at historyofwesteros.com, along
with everything else we mentioned throughout this
episode that relates to things you can buy or sign up for or
join or participate in. You can pretty much all that's a
history of westeros.com. It's our sort of hub for all
that. The answer to our trivia
question, The Who came up with the Grand Master office and
when, Aegon himself in the Year 5 AC.
So about one year after the events of this episode, as I
said next week, first blood and fire.
As in first blood and Fire. What it's.
Worth first blood is a very different connotation to me as a
woman. Was that true for lots of women
when that movie came out? I wonder when the Rambo movie
drowned like First blood, lot of women were like, that's not what
that means to me. Yeah, yeah, I I didn't even get
into just now that that's what you meant.
I thought I was like, I don't think there's anything to do
with menstruation in this episode, but I'll see what Aziz
has to say. Yes, so some episodes mentioned
in this one that might be of interest to you because they
relate to this one before The Dragons, Under the Dragons, The
episode on Valerian and our Blackwood episodes, which deal
with some of these conflicts with the Brackens from a much
more detailed view and of course expands on different conflicts
that weren't mentioned in this episode.
Don't forget we've got the last storm episode for patrons and
members only. That's the war between or the
part of the war that encompasses Raines and Oris fighting against
the Stormlands and the Great Argolac, the Arrogant and the
Red Kraken Ditto. There's that's not a Patrons and
Members episode as well. That's more about the loss of
the old way, the changes to the Iron Isles in this era, and how
they broke free again during the Dance of the Dragons under the
Red Kraken, AKA Dalton Greyjoy. Thanks to everyone who came to
watch live or if you listened later.
We appreciate either way. Thanks to those of you who
support us either as a through a membership on Patreon, A
recurring or one time donation through our website, or by
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it on to your Spotify subscription.
Just join us through there. It's right there in the link of
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If you're listening on Spotify, there's a link to sign up.
Thanks to Nina for her great notes.
Always very helpful. Check out good
queenalley.tumblr.com. Thanks to those of you.
Thanks to those of us. Those of us thanks to our back
end music and video helpers Joey, Jesse Brand and Michael
Klarfeld. You guys are amazing.
Our show looks a lot more professional because of y'all
and that's it for this week. We will see you next week for
more fire and blood, more Valar reredis.
So do that Valar reredis.