Aegon the Conqueror wanted all of Westeros South of the Wall.
Not most of it. All of it.
From his perspective, he had been relatively patient.
With few exceptions, the majority of the realm had bent
the knee to the Iron Throne during the Conquest.
That's why they called it the Conquest.
Now years are enumerated by the abbreviation AC, which stands
for After the Conquest. It wasn't until the year 4 AC
that attacks on Dorne began. So there was, as we talked about
last time in the Dragons interim, a good bit of time
between when hostilities broke out.
Queen Rainey's had promised to return with fire and blood, and
she did, but Maria told her to remember Miria.
Rather, Miria told her to remember the words of House
Martel. Words echoed throughout Dorne.
On rare occasions such as this, an outside invasion is the best
time for unbowed, unbent, unbroken to be all of Dorne's
motto. Not just the words of their
princely house, they're all Martels in terms of this
attitude when the Dragons come or when anyone comes, but
especially the Dragons. But what do those words actually
mean when faced with Dragons and large armies?
It's a difficult proposition, but Aegon might have been a bit
overconfident given his earlier successes, and the Dornish might
have been confident in that and some other factors.
You might be familiar with the general idea of what happens to
invaders, even dragon riding invaders in those deep deserts,
But this is before the Targaryens knew that they hadn't
tried this before. This was new to them.
Now, it wasn't new to some of the people in their armies, but
it was new to House Targaryen. We get to watch them learn the
hard way. Let's put it that way.
We'll discuss what he did right, what he did wrong.
Same goes for his subcommanders. And what made Dorne so
different? How is it that Aegon had such an
easy time with all the rest of the realm, yet such a hard time
South of the Red Mountains? Plus, a lot of these lessons are
going to be or not learned by future Targaryens, and we'll
talk a bit, a little bit about that as well.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. Hello and welcome everybody.
Welcome back to another Sunday afternoon.
If you're here, live, Otherwise whatever day you're listening to
this welcome. And know that we recorded it on
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Get yourself ready. Get signed up on our Patreon and
participate in the choosing of what will be this year, 12
topics and in future years we'd like to do more than that.
So be a part of the first ever topics mood, and if you're
hearing this later, be a part of the second or third or fourth,
whenever that happens to be. Hey, Sean, how's it going?
Good to see you there. You excited to talk about this
episode today? Yeah, I'm mostly excited.
It's I I got to say, this whole storyline is frustrating to me.
Can't we all just get along you? Know well it's it's in the right
place for this sort of thing. When it's real it's it's
frustrating and that's why you feel it that way.
But we get to remind ourselves it's not.
But it does relate to things in the real world.
A lot of realistic things, a lot of ideas that we can maybe bring
ourselves to try to imagine. Not too much like you don't want
to imagine yourself being in a war like this, but we're going
to do it a little bit anyway. We're going to try to put
ourselves in the in the boots of some of the soldiers on the
ground, in the desert and some of these tough spots.
I think that's what makes some of these topics particularly
interesting is, is picturing yourself there, imagining
yourself in it, or imagining someone else in it.
Imagine yourself watching it. Maybe is a more pleasant way to
experience that, but yeah, it's it's not pleasant overall
though, is it? Yeah, I think that's a common
way people like that. Definitely me.
But I think I'm not unique in this.
If people approach how they consume media books or TV shows
or whatever, a lot of the time what's going through your head
is what would I do? I would have done this.
They should do this. You know, you're constantly
thinking about like what would it could have, should have
happened, how you would have done it differently.
And to be fair, a lot of times if I or a objective, rational
person was in that situation, there wouldn't be this conflict
in the first place. That's true.
That's true also. You would have different
attitudes about everything. You wouldn't have 2023
sensibilities. You would have Dornish and you
know, four AC sensibilities or Westeros, he said.
Whatever, whatever part of the round.
I'm living with 2024 sensibilities.
I think you should catch up. I haven't moved on yet.
I'm living in the past. That joke never gets old when
you forget what year it is when you forget to turn the calendar
in. The.
Past. That's right.
Yeah, you've never heard that one before.
Speaking of, you've never heard that before.
The latest question posed to Nina on her blog, Good Queen
allie.com or.tumblr.com Excuse me is written as.
Sorry if you've been asked this before, but where was Princess
Ilia and her entourage headed when Ulmer of the Kingswood
Brotherhood stole a kiss from her?
Good question. Where were they going?
What was the deal? Who else was there?
And was it around the time that Rhaegar unhorsed Simon Toy?
So, really good question. Really interesting episode that
happened not long before the rebellion.
So you want to read Ninas, take on that and see what she says.
It's a good one and if you have questions of your own you to
that you want to direct towards us and you can send them to
westeroshistory@gmail.com or you can ask live during a live
stream. At the end of this episode I'll
mention some episodes that relate to this one.
If you want to stay immersed you can go check those out and I'll
also give you the answer to this tribute question.
What Sigil did House Talland have prior to the first Dornish
War in this episode? It's going to change, so if you
listen carefully you'll get the answer.
Last time we discussed the first few years of Aegon's reign, the
final subtopic we covered was the peaceful attempts to bring
Dorne into the realm. We wondered what those attempts
were comprised of, what kind of offers or threats or both were
made, but regardless, didn't work.
So it's not super important, just a curiosity.
So that takes us to this nice summary style quote from Fire
and Blood about the big picture quote.
The long reign of King Aegon, the First Targaryen one AC to 37
AC was by and large a peaceful one.
In his later years, especially but before the Dragons peace.
As the last two decades of his kingship were later called by
the Maesters of the Citadel came the Dragons Wars, the last of
which was as cruel and bloody a conflict as any ever fought in
Westeros. Since this is a reread for most
of you listening, you might have nodded in agreement at that last
line when you first read or heard it, and perhaps again just
now. Because yes, it is as cruel and
bloody a conflict as any ever fought in Westeros.
Which is what Sean was talking about at the beginning, about it
being frustrating and and awfully violent.
Yes indeed it really is and you thought of a few, a few
parallels to kick us off with wars that get really bogged
down, wars that get really bloody and and and very little
progress gets made on either side, either towards peace or
towards ending a War One way or the other.
There are many, many examples, but a couple I thought might be
particularly apropos are because George would have lived through
them. They might have been, you know,
it's certainly in his brain, if not at the forefront of his
brain was the US and Vietnam. And that was a scenario where it
was, you know, overwhelming forces, right?
Like the US hugely had, you know, more manpower, technology
and whatnot than Vietnam. And, you know, there's, there's
a bunch of reasons, like political reasons why we weren't
fully committed right there just as a policy.
We weren't trying to take over Vietnam.
We were just trying to stop Soviets from taking over.
So we were just sitting there waiting for them to attack us
and they were using guerrilla warfare, right, Which was
difficult to fight against. Even when you have, like jet
planes in the air or whatever. How does that stop people like
in tunnels, hiding out in a jungle, things like that that
that were, by the way, lasted approximately the US involvement
was approximately 10 years from, you know, when Johnson sent
significant ground forces in 1965 to when we're like pulling
people out by helicopter in Saigon in 1975.
This war was also about 10 years, right?
And the USSR in Afghanistan is also something that would have
been in Georgia's life. But we're leading up to the
writing of the books and also lasted almost exactly 10 years.
It was 1980 to 1989, I think that Soviets put forces in till
they pulled him out again. Huge overwhelming forces.
This time in more of a deserted landscape with maybe some more
similarities to Dorne there. But but they were determined to
take over and we're not successful. 10 years of
guerrilla warfare and the the people there, they they didn't
have like huge cities. It could be like choked off or
destroyed. That then shut the comfort
country down and made them surrender.
They were just scattered population through the
countryside and the mountainside.
Just like Dorne. You could attack little segments
of them, but. They were unbowed, unbent,
unbroken. Yeah, they were.
They didn't give up. They didn't just say, OK, well,
we can go back to the. We can go back to our normal
lives unto these conquerors that that's one thing that sometimes
is a consideration, I think. But yeah, these are great
examples, Sean, because, for example, Vietnam, one of the big
things there was tunnels. And here in Doran there's lots
of caves. So not the same thing.
They're digging tunnels, but caves are effectively the same
thing because they are refuge from air power you can't get.
It's harder to get bombed when you're up in a tunnel you can't
get seen or scouted. Of course the jungles help with
that too, but which there aren't in Dorne.
But that's where Afghanistan has more similarity 'cause.
It's deserty and mountainy and and dry and and water and
supplies are really hard to to get a hold.
Of and you know one thing that we tried to do to deal with the
the jungle aspect was napalm. We would like rain fired.
Down to fire. Just like the Dragons.
Like what Rainey's did in in the Stormlands.
Yeah. Near when the armies were
ambushing them, they just started just torching the entire
forest. Like, OK, you're going to hide
the forest. We're going to destroy the
forest. Yeah, that.
You're right. That's an extremely strong
parallel. So let's let's talk about when
this started and we can be pretty sure winter came to
Westeros in the 5th year after the conquest, because it was the
second year of autumn already in AC4.
So they had two straight years of autumn, which is a dead
giveaway that winter is soon, winter is winter is soon.
What am I saying? Winter is coming, right?
I just totally used the wrong slogan.
Wow. So that means the campaign
started in autumn, which is an interesting choice.
Now, this was on purpose. They weren't just like, bumbling
around saying, OK, well, we'll just go attack without any
consideration to what the weather was going to be like.
They thought it was going to help them because, well, it's
hot and dry and Dorne, and if it's autumn, that should
mitigate some of that heat. It should be cooler and the
water would be more plentiful. And they were entirely wrong,
but it wasn't as much of a difference as they probably
would have hoped for. I mean, it's like that thing.
Remember Sean? Remember the Futurama joke?
When they come, the aliens come because they're mad That single
female lawyer was canceled. It's like we will raise the
temperature of your planet 1,000,000° a day for five days.
It's like we're all dead after that first day.
It's the same thing here. Like a little more water isn't
going to save you from dying when you have no water.
You know, like 2 drops of water isn't much better.
Or. You know 94° instead of 112°
like 112 is extreme and to deal with.
But if it's 94 instead, like, that's better I guess.
But you're still going to the horses aren't going to make it,
the armor's going to bake you has too many problems.
Or 112 without water or 94 without water.
I mean, you're you're still without water.
Either way, you're going to water.
Right. Like without water would still
be a problem it. And you know, even if you did
have water, because you got to keep in mind too, it's not like
they just have to exist there. They have to travel hundreds of
miles and they have to keep their horses fed and watered it.
You know, it's not. They can't just like barely
survive. This is supposed to be a a long
March to war. And so they don't even make it
through the long March. Yeah, I don't think.
I don't even know if if they had double the water and 10° cooler.
I still don't know if they were going to make it because they're
being ambushed on the way. It's not just a March, it's a
March through enemy territory. It's too much.
It's sort of like the the example that's cited a lot in in
the real world, don't try to invade Russia in the winter.
Maybe just don't try to invade Russia at all, you know, But but
if you do it in the winter, it's terrible.
And you might and you might get wrong what winter means.
Like they're like, oh, winter is in these certain months, and
then the rest of the time it's fine.
It's like, no, it's hot all the time.
And Dorne, it's just worse in some of the other months.
Yeah, so they they, they mistook some of the ideas here.
I think they they, they overestimated what difference
the weather would make. And they may have overestimated
some other stuff too. They may have expected that the
peasantry, the commoners, and maybe even some of the Lords and
Knights would capitulate quicker because of supplies and their
own fear of being short during the winter.
Like, well, if we go to war now that's going to burn up more
resources than it would if we were just chilling at home,
right? We don't have to go on these
long marches and burn so many thousands of calories a day just
to keep going And and you go through our supplies a lot
faster that if you're sitting at home at winter, you know you're
not going through your stuff as quick.
So they they might have expected that the Dornish would fear that
and that would make them give up quicker, which is part of that
how they started with their strategy and well, it it didn't
work. But in theory it's not the worst
idea. But yeah, it's it didn't work
out. Now Winter isn't going to be all
that bad in Dorne anyway, but they still need things like
bringing their own supplies down.
You can't carry all your supplies right with you at all
times. They have to army, especially
armies of 10s of thousands have to constantly re up their
supplies. They can't just have enough for
them at all times. That's ridiculous.
Right. So a lot of times that's done
with shipping, with boats. You have boats that are near
your armies, and those boats, those navies, can supply your
main columns. That is something that Alexander
the Great did, something that Genghis Khan did.
There's just all the conquerors did things like this.
Not all, but it's a common strategy amongst conquerors.
So there's two quirks here. One is, well, it's harder to
sail in winter or in autumn and then winter.
That's a well known thing in Westeros, especially that side
of the continent. Autumn storms are nasty, they're
vicious. So it's relying on supplies to
be shipped in is pretty sketchy. Now, Sean, we were talking about
this ahead of time. You also pointed out that
there's certain areas of Dorne that you just can't ship
supplies to when that is. That's very accurate.
The southern coast of Dorne, not very good.
Now they're not operating all that much down there anyway, but
it's still it's a good example that that's not an option to
them, that they might have operated more down there if they
had more access. Even the northern coast, do you
still have to, like, go down through those mountain passes
and then across the desert to reach where hopefully ships are
there with supplies? Like, say you don't meet up at
the same time, even if they did coordinate that just perfectly,
they barely made it to the mountain passes, right?
So, like, I feel like it was a mistake to not use the boats,
but that's not really the mistake that did them in, yeah?
It's one of many mistakes, yeah. The mistake I think was to not
bring the troops on the boats in the 1st place.
That's what they should have done is rather than try to walk
down to the mountains and in across the desert potentially to
to link out resupply from boats, they should just been dropped
off by the boats. And now the problem with that is
they probably had that many boats, right.
That's a lot of boats to carry 10s of thousands of soldiers and
we know that a significant portion of Navy was just
destroyed in the past couple years, so.
You're you're totally right. There's another logistical issue
here as well, which is that the most, the bulk of the troops are
coming from the Reach. And not just the Reach, but the
southern part of portion of the Reach, which is around High
Garden. Which would mean if they wanted
to take ship, they'd have to March a substantial way to get
to whatever ships they were going to use.
Like if it's the Arbor bringing the ships up to ship them down
there. And then they'd have to go all
the way around Doran. Because the one good place to
land in Doran is Northern Doran, the southern coast of the Sea of
Doran, which you know, you can go across that sea and get into
the Stormland. That's the the only reasonable
place for bus stop rate, which is still play area racked by
storms. So they'd have to sail all the
way from High Garden, all the way around the southern coast of
Dorm, which is a bad place for sailing, and then all the way up
to the north and then have all those supplies.
Yeah, so. Or potentially they could have
marched from the Reach over to King's Landing.
Yeah. And then come down from the
southern coast of the Sea of Dorn.
But which you just mentioned, they don't have ships anymore
because the Valerian Navy was destroyed, so they'd have to,
yeah. So there's all sorts.
Of all those problems, as bad as they are, I think are less bad
than what ended up happening though.
Yeah, and they could have spent the interim, the Dragons
interim, building new ships, for example, if they knew they
should have known they'd need them.
But that's the thing. I think Aegon was overconfident.
He ships. Navies are almost always a
massive, massive part of any sort of combat, any sort of
campaign. Even if we're talking ancient
warfare, even we're talking pre medieval.
See supplying or just that being a part of a campaign is super
important and I think Aegon got overconfident.
It wasn't a big part of his campaign because he had Dragons,
he had something that the real world doesn't exist and they
never had to deal with or include in their plans.
So I think he just there's a blind spot in his preparations
and his outlook, partly because of two things.
One, he didn't didn't need them, and now he does and didn't
realize it till maybe it was too late.
If he ever realized it, you know, I mean, they never have
figured out what his mistake was or whatever, or that particular
mistake. Since, as you say, Sean, there
were several mistakes. And who knows?
Aegon being kind of a impenetrable personality, We
don't know a lot about him. We don't know.
We're never going to know exactly what he felt.
But we, except for frustration. He certainly was upset that he
failed, that's for sure. But if he aimed his frustration
at certain things, who knows? That's not clear.
There's a few other factors we'll touch on here, too, but he
easily could have been misled. His His overconfidence might
have come from those Southern troops who?
We're just raring to get those Dornish, you know, and and those
guys might have also, even if they had a proper respect for
Dorne and even the desert in the past and everything else, this
is the first time they would have been moving down in full
force with an alliance from other people.
They're not like bringing this big force to attack Dorne and
worried someone's going to attack him from behind while
they're out. Does that make sense that it's
the first time that the people that would have attacked him
from behind are with them to go down to Dorne you know And they
also have the Dragons firepower. There's all these reasons
Heinz's 2020, right I I could see at the get go why they might
have felt confident about this. But.
Also, here's a great point that that Nina made that Dorne was
never truly united until an outside power came in the 1st
place. It was Nymeria in the 1st place
who united Dorne. They were always sort of
disparate and not and relatively independent amongst themselves.
In a way that wasn't so true. Or perhaps is less true in the
rest of Westeros. In the Westeros, and maybe
that's what they were looking at, they were like, well, it
took a outsider to come in and and bring them together.
It's going to take an outsider to do that again.
So they may have looked to that notion as a positive.
It probably wasn't true because they are united now that that
unity still exists. They're still united after
nightmare, even though they do often fight with each other.
They underestimate from the outside how much that squabbling
amongst themselves can fall off completely when they're faced
with an outsider, someone they hate even more.
Yeah, they hate each other, but they hate outsiders even more.
I think that's something that maybe they didn't catch.
Doran also wasn't some extremely powerful nation.
They weren't. They're not an economic
powerhouse. They don't have a lot of cities.
It's really just the plancky town, which is maybe not quite a
city. There's a decent population
there, but it's it's different. It's not a big political power.
They don't wield a lot of power outside their own region.
They certainly wield some. They we saw them get involved in
wars and maybe tilt the scales one way or another when Westeros
was dealing with the step stones or fighting some of the fighting
against the Kingdom of the Three Daughters or any of that stuff.
Dorn was like a wild card that could have impact those
scenarios. But they were never the the
deciding factor. Doran was like, Oh no, Doran
joined this side. That side's clearly going to
win. They were never that big.
What makes them special is their internal workings, not how they
affect the rest of the world. I suppose you could say so by
promising trade deals or other things like that.
It wasn't. It's not as interesting to them.
It doesn't get them as much if you tell the the people of lists
or of Volantis that you have an exclusive trade deal with
Westeros, that's huge. But to Dorne they they don't do
as much trade in the 1st place. It doesn't matter as much.
They're not as interconnected with with with each other, with
the rest of the round, with the rest of the world, which pros
and cons. It means it's it's harder for
them to be as valuable as an ally, but it's also harder to
conquer them, right? I wonder too.
I don't think it's mentioned how much raiding was happening.
We always know that throughout the the centuries throughout the
Eons, raids occurred back and forth between Stormlands, Reach
and Dorne, vice versa, back and forth, etcetera.
Was that still happening in the early days of after the
conquest? If so, it might put a little
more emphasis on egg on getting this done.
It's like, look, there's this constant state of micro warfare
happening here. This is not the King's peace.
You need to do something about this.
And you know, the obvious solution from a conqueror's
perspective is just take the whole thing and then you don't
have to worry about that anymore.
Or you can, you can make it an internal issue and etcetera.
It's no longer a a foreign enemy attacking your Kingdom, it's a
it's a it's unrest within your Kingdom, which makes you look
better I guess when you're king it's weaker when you have
outsiders attacking you and you're not doing anything about
it, even if they're just Raiders and they're not any political
threat. Still someone like Aegon who's
trying to show how strong he is and act through pure domination
and always taking the challenge head on winning to show how
strong he is, this is this would bother him.
Perhaps. Maybe.
Maybe eke away at a little bit of his mystique, and I think he
thought that was important. So.
But peace is valuable now. Peace is a valuable thing on
either side, right? That's something Dorman say.
Well, yeah, OK, well we can. Maybe that's a thing.
We don't care as much about the trade or the prestige or
whatever. But peace, that's that's worth
something. I'm not sure that Miria was
someone who cared about it as much as maybe some of her
descendants will. I I even think that she would
care about it. But she doesn't care about it as
much as she cares about her independence or her legacy or
all these other factors. And you know, that's like
through history, especially in modern times, that's a common
conflict between security, peace, you know, and
independence, freedom. Those are often in conflict.
And Nina points out, too, Aegon may not have wanted to look like
just a greedy conqueror. Like, I take everything, you
know, he might might have take taken some time and done the
negotiating route, perhaps not even thinking it would work.
But just for optics is like, well, we can't just go attack
everyone, you know. We should at least try to handle
things diplomatically first. And showing that he has that
gear, you know, even if in his mind he's like oh we're probably
just going to. That way he can maybe make them
look like the bad guy. He he he can sort of say, hey
look we tried to find a peaceable solution.
It just didn't work. It's like no one's going to make
the argument Why not just do nothing.
Why not just leave them alone? You know, it's like well, that's
politics, right? He's he's saying he's he's
creating his own argument by he's he's both creating the
argument and answering it all at once without while ignoring some
of the other issues here that that's that's that's the people
that's that's like the whole history is written by the
winners statement there. Like, he gets to decide how this
is framed because he's the one with the voice.
It it is true though, given that he's going to attack them, given
that it is his mission to unite Westeros.
It didn't pan out this way. But he probably hoped that by
offering peace first, he would look, maybe not look like the
good guy but more the good guy And that maybe he wouldn't even
need as much war. If like, the people of Dorne in
general. Like, yeah, we want peace.
We don't want this fight. That's myriad.
That's that's some spear. We we're all happy to be part of
West Rose. Sure we're not going to fight
back. You know, if if they understand
he's offering peace. But it's the leaders that are
once again a parallel to Vietnam.
You know, like the people in America, like, why are we even
doing this? You know, like, yeah.
It's like, see, these Vietnamese just refused to make peace.
Like yo, you attacked them in the 1st place, you know, like.
But people will forget. Yeah, people will forget that.
Or they'll yeah, they will accept the framing without
questioning it. Right.
And they're even. Even then.
It wasn't that simple too. Like, there was a bigger
picture, right, that we're worried about Soviets taking
over the world and they got a foot hold of Vietnam.
So we got to do something about that.
You know, Adrian feels like we have to unite Westeros series,
however justified these reasons are that was what was
underlined. So but The thing is in it it did
Eventually the people of America were fed up and just, you know,
political pressure became too much and the we we got out of
there was and it was like a a mar.
It was like a loss, you know, it was like a what do you call it
an embarrassment of defeat to you know, things America's not
used to right. And so but it didn't happen.
It's like the other way around here.
Like eventually Aegon does stop, right?
Because it's they're so bogged down.
The people of Vietnam weren't saying like, oh, since he
offered peace, we'll go along with that and turn on our
leaders. They didn't turn on our leaders.
They didn't. You're right.
It was just it was more medieval.
It was like we're on our team, we stay on our team.
We don't care. We don't have considerations
like human rights and and basic considerations for for the
sanctity of life that that we hope to have here in 2024 that
they definitely don't have there.
A little bit of a tangent, but I wonder how it would have been
different because it is that one different thing about Vietnam.
Was it It was on TV. Everyone was seeing all this
violence and destruction and then the loss of innocent lives.
I wonder if the people of Dorne, because they're not as connected
with each other, they might not have realized how widespread the
the tragedy and loss was. I wonder if they if it would
have changed anything if they did know better.
That's a great point that we're going to get to because it's
also going to come up for Egon and his armies.
And it's like, well, what? Didn't we have a 3rd Army?
What happened to that army? Like, we're not talking about
them anymore. That's kind of ominous, You
know? You're like, didn't.
Weren't there some Storm Landers then?
They have an army like around here with us and like what
happened to them? Well yeah, they're gone.
That's going to happen. So that's we'll get to that
later. So this whole another aspect of
this is Aegon had already started calling himself King of
the Roinar. That title that Robert has that
we see the titles, titles, titles The King of the Roin.
That wasn't like added when Doran finally came to the realm.
The Targaryen kings were saying that from the beginning like
starting with Aegon and all the way through until it was
actually true. It was not true for, you know,
190 ish years, but they said it anyway.
It was probably the darnish pro, like, shaking their heads like,
no, you're not, you are. Absolutely.
You're not, I think. Does that mean that technically
it's been untrue for more of the Targaryen rain than it's?
True. Good point.
Yeah. Like, it's not like Danny isn't
really like, she calls herself that, but she's not there
either. So like I.
Don't know. Yeah, it was only true for about
for about 100 years. Yeah.
Not true for about almost 200. So yeah, that's really funny.
Now there's it gets funnier though, in the real world, as
silly as that is. The real world is way worse,
like it often is. At the heart of the 100 Years
War, which of course is England and France, going at it multiple
different times, of course, obviously didn't start and end
with the same people involved when it's 100 years.
Here there was the English Plantagenet, King Edward the
Third, who is grandson of King Philip the 4th of France.
They kept starting at 1340. The Kings of England added King
of France to their title and kept doing that until the year
1800. Napoleon finally scared him off.
Yeah. Napoleon, you're like, oh, OK,
never mind. That was before Napoleon, I
guess. It was he came.
It was like another 40-50 years, yeah, but still they saw him
coming. They, they, they, they felt it
coming. They're like something is
coming. They had their own little
prophecy of of snow and ice and. In Russia.
In Russia, yeah. And they, they thought of
vanilla and chocolate and strawberry coming right at them.
And that's Neapolitan. That's not Napoleon.
Right. close. Yeah, very close.
Very close. It could be a nice substitution
to make if you could go back in time.
Yeah, instead of invading Russia, you should have had ice
cream. That's better.
That's that's much better. OK, so let's go into this next
section first. Blood and fire.
This is how it begins. Quote.
The start of the First Dornish War is generally fixed at 4 AC
when Rainey's Targaryen returned to Dorne.
This time she came with fire and blood, just as she had
threatened. Riding Meraxes, the Queen
descended out of a clear blue sky and set the planky town
ablaze, the fires leaping from boat to boat until the whole
mouth of the green Blood was choked with burning flotsam, and
the pillar of smoke could be seen as far away as Sunspear.
The denizens of the floating town took to the river for
refuge from the flames, so fewer than 100 died in the attack, and
most of those from drowning rather than dragon fire.
But first blood had been shed. It had indeed.
So remember that Plancki Town is basically a boat city.
The entire thing is a bunch of boats lashed together.
Shops, homes, everything floats on the river as part of it.
I've seen this. I've not obviously the Plancki
Town, but I've seen something like this in Cambodia.
Just large, large platforms all latched together, multiple boats
and then other platforms and edifices attached to that.
It's it's pretty amazing actually, and not so it wasn't
to this extreme, but you know, I have seen something like that in
the real world now. Boats are extremely vulnerable
to Dragons. Anything wooden is and this
isn't moving like a lot of boats.
And even moving boats are extremely vulnerable to Dragons
because you know they're not that fast compared to a flying
dragon and especially in this era you see very few anti dragon
type weaponry. There's going to be more of it
because, well, people need it. But for a while there during the
before the Targaryen conquest between the Century of Blood and
the Fall of Valyria, there was a time where the world may have
for maybe not forgotten about the threat of Dragons, but it
wasn't a problem. Like there weren't Dragons
coming to attack your cities, or it wasn't a concern.
So items like scorpions and these larger bolt throwers might
have, there was less demand for them and thus there would be
fewer people who knew how to make them and etcetera.
Now that's obviously going to change, but certainly wasn't.
Doran wasn't prepared at this point by any means for such a
thing. Maybe they should have been.
They may be, arguably they should have been.
They probably knew that something like this was going to
happen. Or maybe they should have known
that something like this was going to happen.
After all, she promised to return targets, obviously
showing they were more than willing to do this sort of thing
to just attack to basically unprovoked.
And so, yeah, And it would have, had they sat down to think about
where the Targaryens would attack.
Well, the blanket town is at the mouth of the green blood.
It's a very kind of obvious target, right?
It's, it's, if you look at the map, you can see where it is.
So one of the reasons it's obvious is because it's so
vulnerable, all the ships, all the people, and because Rainey's
could probably attack it without being spotted from very far away
in the 1st place. She said she comes out of a
clear blue sky, but she could have been flying over the ocean
where it would have been harder to see her from a distance until
it was pretty close, until she's right there and, you know, she
probably made some people nervous, They're like, wait, is
that a dragon? What?
What is that? You know, from a distance?
And then as she get closer and closer and you realize that
she's moving fast and she's not veering away, and why would she
be? Coming towards Plancky Town for
any reason other than to attack would be like the sinking
feeling that some few might have and then panic might start to
spread. And then that first blast of
flame happens and then you know it's on and then people are
jumping in the water right away. There's no reason to stick
around and wait. And that's why the casualties
were relatively low. I guess is because while she's
torching all these things, everyone else on the entire
platform is jumping off, you know, so they they actually
would have had a decent amount of time.
Not that it makes their lives much easier afterwards, but they
did have an opportunity to jump off.
A couple other factors are I think it's possible if not
likely that a large portion had already been evacuated.
They, I think there's I don't think it's unreasonable at all
to think that they had an idea that something was coming right
that not only in general they they know the threat has been
put out there, but the mobilization of all these forces
that would have been noticed. That's a good point.
Yeah. OK.
Yeah, even without a particular spy network, I think scouts
would have just observed it. They're just, you know, when you
mobilize 30,000 humans, that's going to have effect in
surrounding your communities, Words going to spread.
But if you do have scouts and spies in place, you would
definitely know and Plankey Town would have been a prime target,
right? Like like every city quote UN
quote city, every castle village, whatever.
Might have been on high alert, right?
They the word might have been sent out in Planky Town, which
would be particularly vulnerable to dragon fire and a big
population. It was all the reasons they they
went there. But the reason is Miria would
know it's a place that might go, right?
So. I think there's a.
Chance that there might have been some sort of plan in place
already to to have people moved. Out, or at least to put them on
warning. Yeah, at least like let people
know, like, 'cause it's a long time, you know, They never know
when exactly it's going to come. But that's a great point about
the mobilization of the troops. And like, they had to know
something was coming. You don't like, you like.
And the 30,000 is the right number.
That's how many Reachmen mobilized.
And that's just the fighting, man.
There's obviously other people in the army that are supporting
it and supplies getting together, all that other stuff.
Exactly. Because even if all the military
leaders were lips tight secretly organizing 30,000 troops, it's
just the people in town are just going to notice this happening.
All the wives and farmers you get, all the the food being
gathered. It's just that's a huge
commotion to not get noticed, to not have word spreads.
It also just doesn't really go with Aegon's like vibe.
He is AI attack you head on and you know I'm coming and that's
that way. There's no doubt as to who's
stronger 'cause I didn't trick you, I wasn't clever.
We took our best. It was strength versus strength
and I came out ahead. That's that's how he likes to
present his his victories. I think so like sneaking up and
you know, we won because of the element of surprise.
That's not how he wants to be portrayed.
He wants to be portrayed as well, I won because I was
stronger. Period.
You know, and it's not hard to do when you have Valerian, but
definitely he was disabused of some of what counts for strength
and and other people's willingness to just meet him
head on like this. Well what if we just don't meet
you head on? Mr. Giant Dragon.
You know, he's like, Oh, well, I don't know actually.
I guess I win. I mean and he is he does seem a
little confused by this strategy even though to us it's kind of
obviously well yeah of course you don't go fight the Dragon's
head on this seems like the the obvious choice whereas the the
folks in in Westeros the rest of Westeros made the made the silly
choice Anyway it's pretty it's pretty evil stuff though right
Just going in and burning like all these boats and all these
people and. It is, don't get me wrong,
because I want to point out even if only 100 people died there,
first of all only 100 people. I guess you can say that when it
might have been thousands, but it's so awful for 100 people to
die. AB all the people who live lost
their homes and their businesses and their livelihood and
everything else even outside the context of the rest of dorm
burning its crops to keep the the invading army from having
anything to pillage. There's there's no way the rest
of that population was just fine.
I guarantee you people starved to death.
People who didn't immediately die of burns ended up dying of
burns. All the other problems that
would come with an entire town being burned down it's it's not
as simple as only 100 people died.
There's a I just can't imagine the the drama, the anguish and
everything that the rest of that population had to go through in
the coming days and weeks and even years to try to rebuild
from that. The the every one of those
hundred people had a mom, a cousin, you know, like all the
families are upset. Yeah, so it's awful.
Yeah, it is. Really.
Yeah. But I do wonder.
Another thing I wonder is if, especially because it doesn't
seem like we're at Revenge mode yet, and so far a gun has just
been trying to take out military targets and win quick, easy
victories without a lot of losses.
He wants to rule the land, not destroy it, right?
So I wonder if the dragon circled around a couple times,
maybe a couple strafes a key spot right to to to block off
the the the waterway Time might have been given for people to
escape, is what I'm saying. She was letting people get away.
She's OK. Yeah, maybe that's entirely
possible. Yeah.
You got to throw that out there as a possibility.
Or. Or it could be a lie.
It could be a lot, maybe that maybe a lot more than 100 people
died, and that's just what was recorded.
I don't see the. Point I don't want the numbers
to get out. I don't see the point of that
given how many people died and how vicious this war got.
It's like, oh, but we're makes it look a little bit nicer.
Now there's just. That's like 1 raindrop in a
storm because of how vicious this whole thing was.
So but it was at the beginning so, so maybe.
But yeah, this was an attack, like you say, Sean, this wasn't
a military target. This is an attack on people.
This is like just burning a bunch of villages, important
villages, like crucial villages, food supplying villages.
One of the great things about A Song of Ice and Fire is the pros
is so strong. There's so many great quotes, so
many lines that stick with you in the real world that you can
refer to as touchstones. And one of them is here.
You were just referring to what do you have left when you're
everything you have is destroyed.
All you have left is your life. Miri Mazdur has a quote on that.
Look to your call, she says when and see what life is worth when
all the rest is gone. Like when you everything you
love, every person you love, all the things you knew, like, what
good is life at that point? You may as well be dead.
Like your life is maybe not even worth living at that point.
And that's that's the point she's making.
And that's the kind of point you're making here now.
It's not quite as bad. They didn't.
She didn't. These people didn't lose all
their own people. There's still a lot of Dornish
left and there's still a people they would like you said.
They probably still have cousins and mothers.
Not as not quite as overwhelming as what happened to Miriam
Asdor. Her entire world was in that
village, but the point is, it's very similar and the destruction
was strong. No matter how whether Rainey's
gave them a little time or whether she just went full bore,
right away it turned into a full blown conflagration.
There was choking of the ships burning in the in the outcrop of
the harbor. There it was.
It was like a dam, basically. Picture the battle of the
Blackwater, right? The ships choked in the harbor
there. It's very similar just dragon
fire instead of wildfire and there would even be non normal
looking flames cause Meraxis would be shooting silver flames.
From her ma I would assume she's silver and that's usually how it
works right? So you would even have that
going. You would even have the odd
colored flames mixed with the normal colored flames.
So a lot of battle of Blackwater vibes there and this is when it
gets kind of horrific. From a a historical perspective,
there's two, at least two things that come up here that would be
in the minds of a lot of Ruinish people, especially the Dornish
people with Ruinish blood, I should say, but just any Dornish
person. Because for one thing, it was
Nymeria's burning of the ships that symbolize the end of their
journey, she said, OK, this is, we've made it to Dorne after all
of our long wanderings, our odyssey basically, And this is
where we're staying and to symbolize that and to truly
invest in our new home, we're going to destroy our ships.
We're going to burn all our ships.
It's a famous moment. It's portrayed on our maps and
it's just a great scene from Westeros history.
And here it is kind of turned around on them, like, yeah, now
you're stuck here. All your ships, we burn them.
And it's that that whole it's your new home is being turned
against them, it's being inverted.
And the other memory would be of course, farther back, the
beginning of Nightmare's journey, when all their cities
were burned by Dragons when they had to leave in the 1st place.
And now here they go and hack again.
They're all living on a river. And these Dragons come and burn
all their river cities and drive them away in their ships and
they flee And that's. So this is, this is a lot of
like historical trauma that's being raised by this attack,
especially considering it's the same.
It's descendants of those same people.
You have the descendants of the Valyrians inflicting a similar
level of devastation and unjust warfare on the descendants of
the Roinar. It's it's pretty heavy and and
there'd be nothing they could do in the longer term.
I like I pointed out, yeah, they might get a hold of some
scorpions, some some bolt throwers, some extra bows here
and there, but here, early on they may not have had much
waiting. Even with the notion that there
might have been something coming, even with the idea that
they should be prepared, they clearly didn't have a whole lot.
So yeah, it's it's pretty heavy. Now one other Speaking of Danny
and Mary Mazduer, yet another parallel comes to mind here,
which is that Danny has the vision of the Crohn's of the
dash, Kellene bowing before her while dripping wet.
Which makes me think of this because they I, I I feel like
they jump into the water the the womb of the world, to maybe
escape Danny's conflagration that she brings on them, which
might be happening in the winds of winter.
That vision will have to get fulfilled somehow, and the only
reason I could ever perceive of them being wet was because they
were underwater or they jumped into the water potentially.
Well, you haven't fantasized about the ladies of the Dosh
Colonica. Different kind of wet, huh?
Yikes. They could have been trapped in
the rain. The rain, yeah 'cause we're all
in the rainfall. Very.
We're APG Show. Very common in the Dothraki sea.
Yeah. So rainies didn't come alone.
This time though, she didn't just come with a dragon.
Start burning the planky town. Well, she.
Didn't come alone this time. She come with Aegon Okay.
I'm sorry. I'm done.
Your minds in the Yeah.
So she was sort of by herself but because she's the only one
attacking the Plankey town. But there were two other
invasion forces that came simultaneously that came
simultaneously. You're you just can't get away
from this now. Anyway, quote.
Elsewhere, Oris Baratheon LED 1000 picket Knights up the Bone
Way, whilst Aegon himself marched through the Prince's
Pass at the head of an army 30,000 strong, led by near 2000
mounted Knights and 300 Lords and bannermen.
Lord Harlan Tyrell, the Warden of the South, was heard to say
that they had more than enough power to smash any Dornish army
that tried to stand before them, even without Agon and Valerian.
No doubt he had the right of that, but the issue was never
proved, for the Dornish men never offered battle.
Instead, they withdrew before King Aegon's Host, burning their
crops in the field and poisoning every well.
Yeah, so that's kind of an interesting strategy too.
I love that point of this guy. Just goes to show how
unprepared, how naive they were. Any army that tries to stand
before us will smack well, none of them tried to stand before
you, just simple as that. It really just is that simple.
Like, well, we're just not going to stand before you, we're just
not going to face you. Like, why would we?
So the vast majority, though, it says it's a, it's a very uneven
pair of advance of of invasion forces.
You've got 30,000 going through the Prince's Pass and 1000
through the Bone way. It kind of makes sense in a way
because the Bone Way's a lot harder.
It's a lot nastier. A lot stonier.
It's called the Stone Way. The Bone Way is the nickname
because of how deadly it is. But it's still not a good idea.
Less men, more men is still a bad idea, still really
difficult. And there were, apart from
what's being described here, with the burning of the crops
and the and the fields and the poisoning of the wells, there
was also night attacks, raids, rocks being rolled down from the
heights, things like that. All sorts of little things that
would really add up. And maybe they don't kill that
many people, but they really, really impact the morale of the
army. You're up, you're in your tent.
You're just like, worried about that.
You're you got anxiety about where the next attack is going
to come from. And you might have gone in
confident, you might have been like, yeah, we're all marching.
Look at how big our army is. Our leaders are really confident
that that confidence will will trickle down to you.
Maybe you're already confident anyway, but as time passes, and
with every poisoned well, every burned field, every day that
passes without any sort of real progress and you're just
marching around and the Dornish aren't fighting you, your
confidence is going to start to ebb away.
Like this is the thing I said at the beginning about putting
yourself in their place and thinking about how this is
going. You start off feeling great
about it, but then you start, there's some cracks in your
confidence and then it starts to like full blown fall apart
because it's hard to be confident when you're not
confident and then throw in hunger, like think about how
hard it is to to do anything properly when you're hungry.
I mean, I'm a great example of that.
I get pretty angry. I would be hopeless in this
scenario and some people wouldn't have been confident
going in. Some of them would have been
frightened from the get go and this would just make them like
pure panic attacks, anxiety attacks and then and then it
would snowball. To use a metaphor that is
entirely inappropriate for Dorne Snowball.
But the hunger, the anxiety, the lack of sleep, all these things
would build like they'd get worse and worse.
Your anxiety would grow, your lack of sleep would fuel the
anxiety, your panic, your inability, and then you're just
not a very good soldier, right? If you ever were in the first
place. Keep in mind some of these
things you know you would have the common soldiers if you will,
but the leaders, they would go through this too.
They would also suddenly have extra anxiety and fear and be
losing sleep. You'd have to set up new guards
systems, new like night watches or whatever.
Just all they have to do is attack one time in the middle of
the night and kill one person. Now 10 people are not getting
sleep every night now because they have to pull guard duty to
prevent against that. And kind of like how I said
before for the those hundred killed at Planky Town, each one
of them would have had a family, a friend, you know, a lot more
was there was more loss than just each of those persons
lives. It was what they were
contributing to the community and their family and everything.
When one soldier dies, they've got a buddy, they've got a
teammate, a Sergeant, a subordinate.
They have, you know, friends. They have a responsibility
there. They were supposed to pull guard
duty tomorrow night or sharpen a sword to feed the hoard,
whatever they were doing. Now someone else has to do it.
So plus they heat, you know, on and on.
It's, yeah, it's so much that that.
There's so many facts we can't even name them all.
And that that's a really good point, Sean, about the the way
the duties will have to be done even as you become less capable
of doing them. Whether or not men have been
lost or not, which they probably have like just anyone who's like
ever worked a shift at a restaurant or a store when
you're understaffed, just picture that but but and put
your imagine to being a life and death situation instead.
It's awful, the non life and death version of this, but the
life and death version of it, it's kind of unless you've been
in it, it's probably pretty much unfathomable.
And this is this style of warfare.
Warfare is familiar to us. We've all heard of guerrilla
warfare before. We talked about it before.
You've probably talked about it or heard about it on other shows
or elsewhere in your life. But the the Dornish especially
or or we even associate this with them and we have been doing
that ever since early in the song of Ice and Fire.
Ever, even before these histories were explored.
You kind of got the vibe, but that was what Doran was about.
That's their style of warfare. You know, we've we've seen it
just based on parallels to the real world is kind of what you
expected. But the rest of the Seven
Kingdoms, they saw the the way that everybody fought Aegon and
expected to be the same and it just wasn't.
And yeah, Doran worships the same gods as the rest of
Westeros, so they have Knights, Lords and ladies.
So, you know, to be fair, there was a lot of things in place
that would make it seem like they might do things similarly.
But there was so much that that showed it how wrong they were.
Because even if you say, OK, Aegon and Rainey's and, well,
Basena's not here, but even her advice would have been part of
the campaign planning strategy. OK, so they're not used to
guerrilla campaigns. Maybe they didn't expect that,
but their allies did. Their allies should have the
Reachman, the Stormlanders. Where was their advice?
Where was their? Maybe the maybe Aegon didn't
listen to them or or many of the veterans of the Stormlands died
fighting Argillac alongside Argillac the Arrogant.
That was a very bloody campaign amidst the whole conquest, which
we talked about with Jim Mcgeehan in our Battle of the in
the Battle of the Stormlands. That Battle of Last Storm
rather. And so maybe a lot of that
wisdom that would have been because it's really the
storylines that fought even more that they had the really vicious
relationship. Argalac and Myriad.
So maybe or his veterans would have been the ones that had the
most to say that Eggon might have listened to, but they just
weren't. They weren't there.
They were dead. They all.
They died next to Meraxis and Oris and and Argalac and well,
not next to next to the first two who lived and Oris who
didn't. So what might have outweighed
their potential wisdom might have been a quest for revenge or
a bolstered confidence, since they had allies going with them
so. That's true.
And and so many men lost in the field of fire as well.
So like this, maybe some smarter Reachman, those who might have
known better might have died. So yeah, now there was some
experience Stargarians had with this, like remember her?
And the Black Suns did a surprise attack at the Battle of
the Wailing Widows and all that, but it wasn't, it wasn't
anything like this. And those were maybe like 1
offs. This is like a constant thing,
like every night they feared night attacks.
I don't get the impression that Aegon's campaign was worried
about that. In their March to the
Riverlands. It was like oh they got us this
one time, but that's very unlikely to happen again.
They'd like for one thing Aegon's chased after them and
burned them. So it's like well these same.
It certainly won't be the same group doing that.
And Heron's sons were amongst them.
So like yeah the opportunity just wasn't there.
It's it's not dorned the they don't have mountains to hide in.
They don't have mountain rocks to roll down on you when you're
in the Riverlands. You know it just the the terrain
is just totally different ball game and of course it's smarter.
We've said this over and over. We probably will.
It's it's yes, this is clearly a better way to fight Dragons.
Hiding in caves means the Dragons can't scout you out and
see you from a distance, which was also a factor in the in the
storm lands with the trees, which is why they burned all the
trees. That comes back to our Vietnam
example and the napalm and all that.
So are the Dornish being smart? I I'd say yes to a certain
extent, but I think a bigger aspect is just the Targaryen and
the Allies are being dumb and the Dornish are just like, yeah,
let them be dumb. Let's allow them their dumbness
to ruin them and we'll just play around that.
So yeah, I don't think it was an advanced strategy by that.
I don't think the Dornish were doing something they hadn't done
before. This wasn't some new adaptive
strategy. It was just used against an
enemy that they hadn't faced before or or at least since the
days of Valyria, but not in Dorne.
What do you think about that, Sean?
Do you? Would you say it's more about
the Targaryens being naive or semantics maybe?
A little of both. I want to point out one thing
that might be different about this is it Dorne is doing it as
a nation instead of like, you know, towns on the borders where
these skirmishes happen sometimes, right.
It's different for all the Dorn to be doing it.
Does that make sense? And I and I again, I do think
that. So, you know, maybe that's the
way a difference, if you will, maybe Dorn ramped up, you know,
just the coordination to have these different towns be emptied
out takes a level that wouldn't have been there just because
like, you know, some some March or army, some, you know, some,
some conflict up in some mountain passes, that doesn't
make the people in Planking town do anything differently.
Does that make sense? Yeah, that's true.
That's. So so door doing it as a whole
might be something that's new or underestimated or and and also
you know I think that that it it does seem like Aegon's forces
are making some mistakes. But I still think that they it
would have been hard to really see how all this was going to go
right even if they had tried to amend some of these mistakes.
Like I said, like say they had loaded up boats with supplies
and then the boats are waiting there in the northern coast of
of Dorne like oh, it wouldn't have mattered they never got
there anyway. There's a lot of mistakes they
might have accounted for and it wouldn't have been enough to
really stop the the all out effort that Doran was going
through or I can even imagine some people just like in Doran
despite all the losses. Doran, as bad as it is for this
force coming down, it's it's it's especially right here in
the beginning. I think the overall losses for
Doran were probably greater, but it never made Doran want to back
down. I don't think all these troops
that have been in conflict with Doran forever or like, Oh well
they beat us in one battle or we might lose some soldiers they
they might get us with the guerrilla tactics.
I guess we shouldn't do it like dates are.
Just like in real world, when people have grudges, when
there's generations long, you know, conflicts have been going
on, people make mistakes. They just charge him with this
foolhardy braveness. Just 'cause they want revenge,
you know? Yeah, hate is a really powerful
drug, isn't it? Yeah.
It really is so and and there's some other considerations too.
Again, we try really hard to put ourselves in their minds, both
sides of this and all minds in between the people who were in
control or just following along. And it's sometimes you can't do
that, but we do. We try to do our best.
And I think that if you try to have like the mindset of Aegon,
who's ultra confident, ultra like macho almost would be to
use a modern term, he's not going to look at this as
something he can back down on again.
Nymeria united Dorn and she didn't have Dragons, she didn't
have a big army. She had refugees, right.
She had way less than Aegon and she did this.
How's Aegon going to look at that and be like, well, if she
can do it, I I can do it and I should be able to do it easier
because I have a lot more than she did, right?
From his perspective, from what he thinks power derives from,
from where he thinks strength comes from, the way he
approaches these problems is very different than how my
nightmare did. Nightmare a lot played people
off each other. She used alliances a lot.
She had didn't have these obviously overwhelming powers to
use so she had to use more cleverness and and things like
that. Not that Aegon wasn't clever.
It's just he didn't have to be clever and and we we don't use
your clever muscles they atrophy right.
So he he also that also means he's not as clever in
deciphering his opponent's cleverness and predicting
cleverness. He expects them to be a little
more like him and face him head on and just this is how we prove
who the strongest is. It's me.
But so he's got to be like, this woman did this, but I can't do
it. Like, that's crazy to him, you
know? And it's crazy to a lot of
Westeros because they're also very much drinking that same
kool-aid of there's definitely very a woman can't conquer
something that a man can't conquer.
Like, that's crazy to them, right?
That doesn't make any sense in their worldview, especially when
there's also women on their side with Dragons.
So, like, they've got both of that things covered.
They've got all that covered. So they just can't understand.
They can't conceive losing here. They've got the bigger army.
They've got the UN unbroken advantage of Dragons.
They've got so much, they just even though we can look at it
and say, yeah, that there's also so many problems, but they just
don't see those problems as being able to overcome their
advantages. So who knows how long it had
been since there had been a full on war against Dorne.
You know, we we've heard that Argolac had turned back a
Dornish invasion early in his reign, which is pretty
interesting. And given how long Miria has
been alive, I mean she's in her, she's not going to die till her
90s and she was probably the one that launched that invasion or
was at least the her father or mother did.
And so she's got a lot of experience with this.
She may have some experience in ways of warfare between these
the kingdoms that we aren't able to suss out and things that even
Egon and his counselors wouldn't have been aware of.
So that's pretty big deal too her, her long term wisdom and
experience is something that we should assume played a big role,
even if we can't be detailed about how it manifested as a
strategy. But maybe this whole avoidance
strategy was just her plan from the beginning.
It was like, well, this is how we're going to do it.
I mean, they must have been confused that no one met them in
the passes. Like, wouldn't this is a good
place to fight. Like if you're going to stop an
army from entering your territory, it's in this narrow
area where they can't use, they can't spread out and get around
you like they're 30,000 men, can't envelope you.
But they chose not to even fight them in the passes where numbers
wouldn't wouldn't tell which might have given moreover
confidence to the invasion. Like what?
They won't even face us. They won't even you take take.
Their best defensive positions, when they're given to them, they
won't even use that. So they're they must be afraid.
They would tell themselves that, right?
They're afraid that that that's what this mindset is.
If you're the type of people that you always decide, decide
things, bond, pitched battle, and someone won't have a pitched
battle with you. You tell themselves, you're you
tell them, you tell yourself they're afraid.
That's we. We saw that.
We've seen that a few times in In A Song of Ice and Fire as
well. By the way, they were afraid,
but that doesn't mean that they gave up, right?
Right, very important distinction.
True, a lot of times you make some great decisions out of
fear, right? Yeah, like why would like why
would you? Again, It's it's being afraid of
something. Doesn't mean you're a coward or
that you shouldn't be afraid of it.
Yeah, I'm afraid of Dragons. If they were real, I'd be afraid
of that. It doesn't make me lesser.
It makes me like, sensible. It makes like normal.
Like, yes, you should be afraid of something that can kill you
with like 0% effort, you know, by accident, just like it
sneezes and you're dead. You know, like that's that's
what we're dealing with here. If only the Targaryens had a a
some sort of beverage or something that made them
smarter. Something that that helps them
think through things more thoroughly.
Wine. No, I don't think wine would
help with that. Magic wine might, maybe would,
but no. I'm talking about magic, mind I
I I've one thing I've noticed in the difference between drinking
it and not drinking it. Like I've we've had it around,
off and on long enough. We've got another shipment
coming in shortly. I've been at without it for a
little while. I kind of noticed like when we
first had it and then I didn't have it.
I've gone off and on with it a few Times Now that I can sort of
tell that I need it again. I want, I want, even if it's
only a small boost in my focus and who would ever measure
something? Maybe it's a large boost in my
focus. You know, you don't want to give
that up. Once you have something, once
you're a little, once you have something that makes you
function a little better, it's you want to keep that going.
Yeah, I mean, tell us a coffee drinkers.
Yes, makes it very Yeah, it's not that wrong.
I just made an Order of Magic mine myself last night, by the
way. I just ran out of what they had
sent it so. It's like, yeah, like I said,
you were saying with coffee, it's, yes, coffee is addictive,
but the benefits are still there.
Like you want those benefits and it's addictive.
So getting rid of the addictive part is good because you can
still have those benefits. You can still get the boost, the
focus, the clarity, but with less of the jitters and the
like. I got to have this feeling the
the borderline addictiveness, if not full blown addictiveness.
So that's pretty valuable, I think.
I think it's tastier too, but that's also a very much.
Your mileage may vary. Yeah, that's very true.
Taste really does vary. But that's one thing I like
about magic. Mine too is it mixes really
well. You can have it straight.
Sean often says he has it straight, but you've mixed it
with your in your concoctions as well.
And I've done the same thing. Have it over ice, have it as a
shot, mix it in with other juices, just have it with water,
just dilute it, you know? That's fine too.
Which is cool too. Like, just like coffee, you've
got a bajillion ways to drink it.
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Let's get into the ground invasion.
We've talked about the first air strike on Plankey Town, but we
saw and we discussed the troop dispositions. 30,000 men going
South through the Princess past 1000 picked Knights heading
through the Bone Way. And here's what happened Next
quote. The invaders found the Dornish
watchtowers in the Red Mountains, slighted and
abandoned in the high passes. Agons Vanguard found its way,
barred by a wall of sheep carcasses.
Shorn of all wool and too rotted to eat, the King's army was
already running short of food and fodder by the time they
emerged from the Princess Pass to face the Dornish sands.
There Aegon divided his forces, sending Lord Tyrell S against
Uthor Uller, Lord of the Helholt, whilst he himself
turned eastward to besiege Lord Fowler in his mountain fastness,
Skyreach. So yeah, as I said, the Princess
Pass is the Western one, an easier route, though certainly
not easy. And there is an army waiting in
the Princess Pass. It's starting at the start of
The Winds of Winter and another in the Bone Way.
They have standing orders to either open, go into the Seven
Kingdoms that attack or or not. And it's an interesting sort of
situation that's developing there.
Now again, I said this would be a great place to confront an
invading army, and the reason they didn't was Valerian.
Like their defenses aren't what they normally would be with a
big old black dragon just raining fire down on them.
It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work that way that.
This would normally be a great place to confront an army, yeah,
but it's not a great place to confront an army and a dragon.
Yes, good point. Good way to say it.
Good. Sad Sean.
Now we so Aegon split his army. Makes a lot of sense to do that
because you're it's so hard to get food and you you have army
splits up, it's it's going to different places to gather its
food. Problem is there's still so
little food to gather. As it says, the army was already
short of food and fodder just going through the pass.
And this is just the beginning, right?
So already the problems are beginning.
And again, I don't know how the split was with the 5050 split.
Did Aegon take 15,000 guys and 15,000 went?
SI don't know, but it was probably pretty close to even.
He had Valerian with him, so maybe he gave them some more
soldiers. On the other hand, Tyrell's
going to go through the desert, so maybe he wants to have fewer
men. I don't know.
Either way, it wasn't smart. It didn't work out.
This wall of sheep carcasses is really wild, right?
Taunting them with wasted food. Like, look, we we are not
afraid. We're not going to run out of
food. You're not going to get food
locally because this is it. This is this is the local food
all dumped in front of you, rotting.
This is what you have available to you.
It's, it's, it's it's very ominous and very symbolic, and
it's quite a statement. They're like, look, we don't
need this. You're not going to find this.
This is what's waiting for you, you know.
A couple of things. One is that would be a very
difficult and disgusting barrier to try to get through.
Right, and to set up you probably.
Would have preferred a bunch of rocks or something, right?
Like that's. Like think of the morale of the
soldiers that had to deal with that, and maybe even sickness
and disease that got spread from it, I don't know.
But also, Nina points out, this kind of feeds into what I was
saying earlier. They couldn't have just done
that last night, right? That's not one day a sheep.
That's not one day A. Sheep.
Think what it would take to physically get all the sheep
there, to have them shorn and be there long enough to rot.
They had to have seen this invasion coming.
They this is some preparation time they had.
Right, yeah. Instead of sending their army
there, they sent the wall of sheep.
And this would be a lesson that Aegon's great, great, great,
great grandson, Deron the first, the young dragon, learned very
well. He used a goat track to bypass
this sort of thing. Not just not necessarily walls
of dead sheep, but scouts and mountain passes and watchtowers.
Which by the way, one of these watchtowers is probably the site
of the Tower Joy because the Tower Joy is in the Princess
Pass. Now of course Tower Joy is just
a nickname Rhaegar gave to one particular watchtower.
It's it's wouldn't have any sort of defining features at this
point if it even existed, but entirely possible.
I mean a watchtower is in a place is usually put put in a
place because of the terrain and that wouldn't have changed after
a couple 100 years. Most likely it might have, but
probably not. So very high likelihood that the
tower was had been there a long time or one had been in its
place, if it had maybe you know, fallen and been rebuilt or
something. Was that Goat Pass revealed by
Adornish Trader by chance? You know, it might have been,
but we, I don't think we know it may have been, you know.
Information on 300 parallel, you know.
Oh yes, you're right. Yes.
The Fe Altis I think was the name of that trader.
By the way, highly recommend the book Gates of Fire the the movie
300 based on the graphic novel 300.
It was originally going to be based on the book Gates of Fire,
which is way, way better. It's it's historical fiction
rather than, you know, a, a, A basically a comic book, which I
have nothing against comic books, but they don't portray
history very well. You know, history is better for
portraying history than than graphic art, I think.
So you can. Get there.
You can get there, yeah, like the two to get, like read them
both, you know, like they're both.
They're both very entertaining. But I think one is more, a lot
more accurate. We'll say so.
So that's really wild. I mean this whole sheep thing.
And. And you're right to say that
that's part of their strategy, strategy of denial.
Don't meet them in the field. Don't let the dragon destroy
your armies. Make it hard for them.
And they have the other way. Make it gross, make it nasty,
make it unpleasant, make it stink, make it hot.
Take away the water, Take away the food.
All the stuff in an army needs Now remember they they thought
that they had planned around this.
Remember at the beginning of this episode we talked about the
weather and how like, oh it'll be autumn heading into autumn.
Like it's going to be getting. Not only Will is it cooler now,
but it's going to get cooler during the campaign because
we're getting deeper and deeper into autumn and closer to
winter. However, here's how that worked
out for the Tyrell host quote. The Dornish sun proved
unrelenting as Lord Tyrell marched toward Hell Hole.
In such heat men drink more, and every water hole and Oasis in
the army's path had been poisoned.
Horses began to die more every day.
Followed by their riders, the proud Knights discarded their
banners, their Shields, their very armor.
Lord Tyrell lost 1/4 of his men and almost all his horses to the
Dornish sands, and when at last he reached the Hell Hole, he
found it abandoned. I think this is a part of the
reason Doran is so popular in the fandom is this stuff like
this, where they're willing to ruin all their stuff to protect
their people. Every little bit of item of
food, water, all of it is just ammunition to save the humans.
I would say I agree with you. I think some people, maybe Sean
perhaps, would argue against that and say, well, did it
really protect their people in the long run?
Did they, did people die of starvation themselves?
Like, did they hurt themselves by doing this?
I don't know. But but I I do think some people
probably would make that counterpoint that maybe that's
what they considered their honor, their noble, but actually
people are just going to die from this.
Yeah. Maybe, but maybe, maybe we're
wrong. And maybe like no one died of
starvation, no one would like, no families livelihoods was
ruined by them doing this like no sheep.
Maybe. Ruined life.
The sheep with the with like Adding on to your idea was Sean
pointing out very accurately and likely that they planned the
sheep thing for a while. How long have they been stashing
food knowing this might have been coming, like they may have
been preparing for winter, a Dragon's winter rather than, you
know, a different sort of preparation.
So yeah, they've like we've we've given the listeners today
many reasons to guess correctly. I think that they knew it was
coming. You've pointed out there's
several details here that show that.
So this is this is an obvious way to prepare for if you're
going to go hide in the caves, put food, lots of food and water
in the caves. You know, if you're gonna poison
your wells, you better get a lot of water out of there first
before that water is undrinkable for also.
Years, Yeah. My other question is, maybe they
poison the wells knowing exactly what to do to neutralize it when
they needed it to not be poisoned.
So it's not poisoned. When they come back, they know
that, oh, you put this chemical in it and it does that or that
they again knew that it would poison it for.
Yeah. One year they did it before and
it was poisoned for three years and so that's.
Yeah, there might be various things like that.
It's like when the. I think we should give them the
benefit of the doubt that they knew what they were doing.
It can be pretty bad, yeah. I mean, you can.
These, like in Marine, they cut down the olive Groves to provide
to keep food away from Danny's army, knowing that it would be
30 years before those trees could be replaced and growing
olives again. Whereas in that case I think
that was a bad, I think that was a bad choice.
That was, yeah, see, that's, yeah, that's different.
Yeah. So I don't give them the benefit
of the doubt there I guess, cuz I do think.
That food is, Yeah, that's two generations ish before that.
Yeah, they need that. That's the rich slavers can get
food elsewhere. Yeah, but yeah, it's it is a
different consideration. You're right.
Some of this reminds me of our hardcore Houses episode when I I
I, you know, my attempt to define hardcore is that when
things that would normally get in someone's way.
You know if someone's determined to win, if you will, right.
Whatever their mission is that you're like, you're going to win
this war against Aegon. That, you know, if you're if
you're, there's certain things that most people would be held
back by, like super cold weather or hot weather or not eating
human flesh or, you know, something like that.
Or not wanting to sacrifice your innocent population, not wanting
to hamstring a whole generation by ruining all the crops for a
year or two or poisoning. Well, things like that.
That, you know, all this stuff might make darn darn hardcore
and a lot of people might appreciate that.
But there is this balance between peace and, you know,
prestige or legacy or independence.
Oregon, whatever it is Doran thinks they're fighting for.
And I think they went too far with it.
It is a even if they did plan ahead.
And so they might have had some food reserves and stash extra
water, but how much could it have been?
There's still no way that they're not hamstringing the
next years, yeah. Which which they would rather
they feel like that's the better sacrifice than sacrificing
humans or and or independence. Same thing, you know.
I also want to point out what did it take for the invading
army to realize that the well was poisoned.
Oh yeah, so many. People with all these
desperately thirsty people and they start drinking the water.
Like do they do? They drink it and kill over in
30 seconds and it warns everyone else not to do it?
Or does it take a day or two to get diarrhea?
And slowly, four days after you left the well, people are
dropping dead. Are they boiling the water and
now you're? Still desperately thirsty and
you do it again. Like, how many times did a bunch
of you have to die or get just terribly?
I'll before they realize the whales are poisoned.
Like, how could they even know it, you know?
Well, what? Yeah.
What kind of poison are we talking about here?
Are they just fouled or is it like, like you say, is it
something that you could boil out or is it or not?
You know, I don't know. Yeah.
It's did they throw a dead sheep carcass down in there to put
rotting bacteria and and and so they could see it immediately,
know not to drink it or was it a hidden poison or was it a deadly
poison? Probably.
Probably all of the above. You know, different different
wells, different. Like they're not going to have
some like standard supply of, well, poison that just everyone
uses. Yeah, just each town did
whatever they could to poison their local wells.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Shea said, some of the
smarter ones or advanced ones might have had a way to poison
it and then an antidote for it. But my other thought here is
just again, how damaging it would be to morale for the
horses to be dying. You got to understand, a horse,
I mean, maybe a bunch of like privileged noble Lords don't
really care about their horses, but I feel like a lot of them
would. I feel like a horse has got to
be cared for. You know, it's it's as much as
like a pet. Like think how much food.
It's an investment almost any angle you look at it.
For your horse to die, you need it to ride to carry your
equipment. You've probably been with it as
a unit for force of your life. You've given it a lot of food
and time and have a bond with it, you know like and for the
for it to die would be devastating on so many levels.
And it's happening on a mass scale.
I don't know, it's just makes me sick to my stomach thinking
about this whole scenario unfolding.
Even someone like Sandor Clegane, like a a pretty mean,
unsympathetic, you know guy, you know, I mean he's sympathetic in
terms of the fandom, but like he doesn't have a lot of sympathy
for others is what I mean, doesn't have a lot of
attachments. He loves it.
He loves his horse, stranger. You know, he may not.
He wouldn't say it, but he really valued that horse.
That's that. Maybe he that's what he would
say, like I got to get that horse back.
He went back into the riot to get that horse, you know, and
Dunk was brought to tears losing his horse and he this is just a
memory of his. We don't.
See it in Dorn, right in. Dorn and other, and he kind of
remembers some of the Dornish men were were sort of like
confused or even laughing at him for losing his horse, but.
You can't afford to waste tears in Dorn.
You can't afford to waste water on crying.
Yeah, so without lifting a finger, Dorn itself, I mean you
could say they lift a finger lifting dead sheep carcasses
without fighting anyone, without meeting this Tyrell army, some
15 ish thousand men marched to the hell halt and a quarter of
them died and who knows how many horses.
Like that's like 4000 men dying in on this March.
Like that's there's no way they saw that coming.
Maybe they could not. They would not have just
advanced into that if they knew it was going to be that bad.
If you've seen the movie Kingdom of Heaven, there's a scene kind
of like this where a crusader army is just heading out into
the desert to chase Saladin and Orlando.
Bloom's character is, and and several people he's with are
just like you guys. This is so dumb.
Don't go chasing a experienced desert general in the desert.
Like, that's insanity. And one of the guys is like,
who's a knight who's always like, well, yeah, it doesn't
seem the brightest idea, but I'm not going to disobey the king,
you know, like of course I'm going to follow the king into
battle. Like what other choices there,
like that's it would be worse to to to disobey the king.
Like somehow this, this disloyalty would be worse than
not walking into certain death, you know like wait a minute,
what is this mindset? But that's that's how it is.
Like that's what really happened.
I mean they were portraying something that that really
happened basically in in real history.
These guys were overconfident. They they're proud.
They think God is with them, you know, which I don't know how
much that part of of things was in play here.
The whole faith aspect for the Westerosi, they might have been
praying to the Seven gods, but they would know that this isn't
a religious opponent. They know that their enemies are
also worshipping the same gods. So it's not like they can't
necessarily expect the Seven to be on their side over the
Dornish. Some of them probably did, but
it's not as clear cut as there's two very different religions at
work here. Anyway.
Saladin did the same thing. He used the desert to great
advantage, didn't fight, didn't let them fight head on head
battles, just let them starve and thirst to death and.
That's much easier. So the green blood seizing of
the green blood is really important.
That's the river. Of course.
By having Rainey caused great devastation there, maybe dare on
the young dragon took that lesson amongst many of the
things that didn't go well during this initial Targaryen
invasion. When he did his, you know 150
years later, he somewhat learned from his ancestors mistakes.
Some of them maybe he didn't learn, but he he did learn some
of these other things and he had a lot more preparation for the
heat and the dehydration in the water.
It was still a problem, but it was not something that just
broke them. He was prepared for it now, and
there's details missing from Daron's campaign that we will
eventually, hopefully get in Fire and blood too, AKA blood
and fire, and we'll return to that topic then.
But some of those details aren't given.
It's just implied strongly that though the sun was nasty, they
didn't suffer nearly as much as this army was due to better
preparations. That's how it was going for the
Tyrell army. Very badly.
What about the new Lord of Storm's End, Oris Baratheon?
How is it going in the Bone Way? Quote.
Oris Baratheon's attack fared little better.
His horses struggled on the Stony slopes of the narrow,
twisting passes, but many balked completely when they reached the
steepest section of the road. Where the Dornish had chiseled
steps into the mountains, boulders rained down on the Hans
Knights from above, the work of defenders.
The Stormlanders never saw. Where the Bone Way crossed the
river, Will Dornish Archers suddenly appeared as the column
was making its way across a bridge and arrows rained down by
the thousands. When Lord Oris ordered his men
to fall back, a massive rock fall cut off their retreat.
With no way forward and no way back.
The Storm Landers were butchered like hogs in a pen.
Oris Baratheon himself was spared, along with a dozen other
Lords thought worth the ransom, but but they found themselves
captives of will of Will, the savage mountain Lord called
Widow Lover. Fared little better, it says.
That's an understatement. They all they were, quote,
butchered like hogs and a pen. Yeah, they fared about as bad as
it could. That's, yeah, that's.
It seems like they fared much worse.
I'm almost confused by that phrasing that there must be
something more to this or something like like I legit
wonder if there was a portion of the army that didn't get trapped
between the boulder fall or whatever because.
I don't know. Yeah, it's such a Yeah, it's
such an understatement. I mean technically more men died
on the way to Hellhole because there was just so many more of
them. So maybe that's the point like
up to like 4000 men died on that March and this was all of them
that died and this one. But there's only 1000 of them.
So like arguably that's I mean more loss of light.
I don't know. But, but either way, it's it is.
It's if you're a Targaryen or Baratheon fan, that's about as
bad as it gets. If you're a darnish fan, you're
like, yeah, get them. That was great.
What a win. You know, terrain being used to
huge advantage when done properly.
Picture. I mean, just picture it, it says
you're crossing a bridge over a river.
This isn't some large stone bridge, surely it might even be
like a rope bridge, but it might be a wooden bridge or something.
Anyway, so obviously there's only so many people that can
cross at once. You don't have, like, masses of
men all crossing the bridge at once.
At least you shouldn't. Make it a make it a big stone
bridge. Still.
How many people were getting across at a time?
Still, what do you do when the rain arrows start raining down,
you know? Yeah, and it seems as if from
nowhere these arrows start raining down.
It would be a panic maybe, but you know at worst, but at best
people are hurrying quickly and unable to get off quick enough
to to get cover. So some people may have some
Shields and they're doing what they can.
But then you're getting close to let's say, let's say you're one
of the men in that press and you manage to escape.
You get off the bridge and you're retreating back away from
the bridge and then an avalanche comes at you, the direction
you're fleeing in a full blown rock avalanche and the arrows
are still flying. Then you look around you and you
realize there is no way out. You are completely trapped.
You've got a gorge and a active rock fall, and then the the
noose is tightening because the soldiers that have you
surrounded are getting closer as you are suffering more and as
the chaos increases and as the officers are trying to get some
semblance of, like forming up, get your Shields up this and
that. But people are just too
panicked. They're probably not listening
now. Instead of just arrows, you've
got Spears and javelins because it's closer.
By the time people are in hand to hand fighting, there's
probably barely any resistance. I doubt the Will Lord Will lost
many of his warriors that day. Probably very few, maybe none.
It's quite possibly they had zero casualties, something like
that. It was just such an effective
ambush. It's it's actually, I would
rarely consider such a overwhelming success, but this
is possible. So and it's in part partly
because it's a small army only 1000 men and yeah that made it
easier to encircle them in one hand they didn't need as many
supplies and and something maybe that that they're being smart
but if they had brought a lot of men that would have been used
against them and they brought a fewer men that was used against
them. It just just goes to show how
kind of impossible the whole thing was given their given
their strategy maybe if they had done it differently.
But yeah, so they, the Storm men, suffered huge losses during
that portion of the conquest. And maybe this was another
factor as to why his portion of the army was so small.
Whatever reasons there were, though, it clearly didn't work
out. The Will of Will is called the
Widow Lover in that quote and elsewhere, and he is named,
quote, a Savage Mountain Lord as well.
There. The Mountain Lord part speaks
for itself. He is literally a Lord of a
castle in the mountains. His family has known the area
for countless generations. He's got to know all these
routes, hidden passes, tunnels, just everything.
I mean, they've been there so long, they know all the stuff,
all the routes. They even maybe made their own
tunnels in a few spots here and there.
And that's going to matter, because Aegon will be very
unhappy with the Will of Will, and for this and other reasons,
but it's hard to punish a savage mountain Lord who has tunnels he
can hide in. And yes, the Will of Will Will.
He's not going to truly get a comeuppance.
Maybe his his descendants. However, that's another matter.
So we'll be certainly coming back to this character.
This reminds me we we made a lot of comparisons to real world and
other fantasy. It's time for one of those.
Here we got the Fremen and Dune. This is kind of how I picture
the will of Will there. These guys are a little more
bloodthirsty. I think the Fremen are a little
more composed and a little more disciplined and other things.
But the the sudden attacks, the making the land their own, like
being one, being part of it, knowing it extremely well,
adapting, making it really harsh for invaders, concealing their
numbers really well, that's a thing in Dune the the Harkonnens
dramatically underestimate How many Fremen there are you.
Can say being underestimated in the 1st place.
I think that's another thing that Aegon did well earlier,
that he and his forces are doing poorly now is gathering
intelligence, just scouting out and prepping for what's to come.
They just went in too quick, too unprepared.
You can't scout caves. You can.
Maybe you. You may not even know The Cave
is there, let alone what's in it.
You know it's hard, like a lot of their natural advantages were
neutralized, like the Dragons can't.
At best a dragon might see them going into The Cave and.
But how big The Cave is, how deep it goes, Yeah, you're not
scouting that well, we saw the entrance, that's about all we
know. So and then Nina makes another
comparison here about the struggle of the horses in the
Arrow Mountain passes. Think of Stannis's Knights
struggling in the snow on the March to Winterfell.
Just a completely opposite type of weather condition, but a very
similar result in terms of how the horses struggle and what
ends up happening to them. Some of them end up dying.
Now Ori's had a battle like this, remember?
He had the first conflict when he marched his army towards
Storm's End, before the final climactic engagement with King
Argyllac was an ambush at the wind water.
And they lost there, remember? They got, they weren't ready for
it. They were kind of caught off
guard. Looks like maybe ours isn't
great at detecting ambushes. This is.
You know, you got ambushed there, you got ambushed here.
But hey, when you're high Lord, you have reasonable expectation
that they're not going to kill you.
And he was right. They kept took him captive.
Maybe it was a little bit of that inborn arrogance.
There's like, well, it's the worst won't happen to me.
It might'll happen to everybody else.
Maybe. But honestly, of course, I don't
think he expected any of this to happen.
I think he just expected to. Win it.
It took a little luck too to not be killed.
Like even if you are this wealthy highborn person that's
more valuable to be ransomed or whatever, he still just might
accidentally get shot or an arrow or just some over Zealous
warrior just keeps swinging his sword and isn't thinking about
ransoms. He just wants to kill the bad
guy. There's all kinds of things that
have to work out just right to to be right instead of killed in
battle. You're totally right.
There's been plenty of cases where someone in Ori's position
was killed in battle. And you're right.
And then then they they might have regretted it because, like,
damn, that would have been a big ransom.
But heat? Heat of battles.
Also a hell of a drug. So another thing of course Ori's
had with him in the Storm lands was Maracies, who he does not
have rainy some Maracies nowhere near at this point.
They're all the way over near the Plankey Town, nowhere near
the Bone Way. So there's the Tyrell host, the
Baratheon host which is no more, and King Agons Host.
Let's see how he was doing while one was struggling and the other
was gone. Quote King Aegon himself had
more success. Sorry I got a break at the
quote. Not hard to do right.
Yeah, the bar was. Low the bar was low.
Sorry. OK King Aegon himself had more
success marching eastward through the foothills where run
off from the heights provided water and game was plentiful in
the valleys. He took the castle sky reach by
storm 1 yarn wood after re siege.
The Lord of the Tour had recently died and his steward
surrendered without a fight. So that's three castles, Fowler,
Ironwood, and Jordain, all kind of heading east toward Sunspear.
You kind of crossed through all those.
Meanwhile, though, the Tyrell host has been severely weakened
and hasn't accomplished anything, and Oris's army is
gone. He would have expected to meet
Oris's army because Aegon goes through the Western pass and
goes east, so he would have expected Oris to would have come
along there and linked up at some point.
But of course that never happened.
He would have been left wondering what happened to Oris.
Where's Oris? And there would be maybe no word
ever. They just.
I'm kind of thinking maybe the Wills would have maybe sent some
sent ahead or two, but they might have just preferred to do
nothing and let them Stew and wonder, like where's our
Stormlander army? And as days pass as Oris as
there's no True Deadly Silence. True, Deathly Silence there.
Maybe like the wonder would be greater.
And maybe some people in the army would be like, yeah, didn't
we have Stormlander allies? Weren't we gonna, wasn't that
didn't I hear something about that?
And then they just would never appear and be like, well, you
know, it's an it's it's a campaign.
Things change. Plans change.
But it would be kind of ominous. It'd be like, what happened to
the Stormlanders? Where are they and and is that
going to happen to us? It would be much smarter, I
think, to not let them know at all because they're more likely
to make mistakes without the information, right?
They're not sure how much water they should be preserving for
this army that might come needing it.
They're not sure how long they should wait before moving out.
Things like this the the the the longer they wait the the the
more likely they are to make bad decisions based on not knowing
what they need to do next and the worst morale gets.
Yes, that's a very good point and and there would might be
attempts to keep the armies from contacting each other.
That might be a specific plan of the Dornish is to use some of
their guerrilla attacks on messengers like Ravens aren't
very useful in a situation like this 'cause you can't send
Ravens to an army in the field. Now, when the army gets to
Helholt, it could maybe send a Raven all the back to King's
Landing or something like that. And but that's still very slow,
even slower than normal communication.
And if they're going to send horse couriers back and forth,
well, for one thing, that's particularly difficult when
you're in the desert like that. You've gone all the way through
the deep desert. I don't know if you can send a
lot of messages back and forth, especially because you don't
necessarily know where to send them.
You don't know where a gun's army necessarily is.
You know, it's somewhere north of you heading east.
And if I'm the Dornish, I'm doing everything I can to stop
those messages going back and forth.
So like you say, Sean, the best play might be to just let them
Stew on it. And it's tempting to rub it in
their faces, 'cause they want to.
It's part of their psychological warfare is to to lower morale.
But this, this, this restraint might actually have a greater
effect. I like, I like that thought, as
dark as it is. So Aegon probably doesn't know.
He doesn't know about how bad it's going in for the Tyrell
army. He doesn't know about the the
Wipeout of the Stormlander army. So this applies to the lower
level guys to this. This like what happened to the
Stormlander army is going to apply to the Knights and Lords,
but the lower levels troops also, Everything we talked about
in the Prince's Pass with the the sheep and the food and the
anxiety, now it's it's getting worse.
It's still getting worse despite a few victories, because they're
they're starting to think like, you tell yourself you're
winning, right? You're you're taking all these
castles. You've taken three of the
biggest, most famous Dornish castles with basically without a
fight. At the first one, you're like,
yeah, the second one you're like, all right, but by the
third one you're like, something's not right about
this. You know?
They're not just cowardly, are there?
This is, this is some plan, and I don't know what it is.
And I'm starting to get scared of what it might mean given all
these other ominous signs here and there.
And it's like they're not actually afraid, are they?
Cause like you don't do the sheep wall if you're afraid.
You don't do night attacks if you're afraid.
Like the the whole narrative, they're afraid of us is going to
be harder and harder to sell to the troops.
Or even if if you do still think they're afraid that that's a
coward's tactic to to to ambush us at night and to block the
path with sheep, all this other stuff.
But at some point, when you're dying of thirst and your horse
is dead and 1/3 of your army is dead, and like, OK, now we're
afraid, I hope we don't have to meet them in the field, right?
Yeah, that was your whole idea in the beginning.
They're scared to meet us in the field.
Well, at this point they're probably scared to meet them in
the field. Yeah, you get to that point
where like actually, I just want to go home.
Thank you. Also, does it kind of seem like
Aegon gave himself the easiest job?
Like he didn't go through the bone way, That's the hard one.
And then he didn't have to go through the deep desert.
He gets to go through the, like the lush part of Dorn.
So it's like, yeah, well, that's what you get to do when you're
the king. Not that Valerian would have
been much help in the desert anyway.
And or probably not all that helpful in the mountains.
It's too large, you know that. The smaller dragon might have
actually been better, you know? Hindsight is 2020 like the way
it turned out It? Sure it sure seems like that,
but I wonder if he had split the forces differently, if he had
stayed with the troops going through the past.
Maybe the dragon could have blown flyer in an outskirts or
or seen you know the the just the dragon and air could have
collected more intelligence or something.
It might have made that battle go differently and whatever
forces did what he did might have been more vulnerable.
I'm not sure how true that is, but you got to at least take
that into account that it's possible that we're being
results oriented here. I agree.
Yeah. And it's entirely possible as
well that it's just a strategy thing.
Like if you'd used Valerian differently, it might have, you
know, different things might have happened.
But he used him. He kind of waited for an army, I
guess. And then none.
One never came. So there was, he just wasn't
deployed. Like, you don't really hear
about Valerian doing anything during any of this 'cause they,
the Dornish, correctly give Valerian nothing to do.
They're like, well, if you want to burn a castle or two, you can
do that. We can't stop you from that.
But you're not going to win the war by melting castles, you
know? Yes, this is time when Valerian
might have been most useful as a messenger.
Yeah, it's like it may be kind of unthinkable to use Valerian
as a messenger, but that might have been the smarter play.
It's like, oh, my dragon is no messenger.
Well, maybe you should reconsider your your hoity toity
thoughts on this Aegon. Remember too if we go back to
Daron the first the the young dragon, they were like, can you
take darn without Dragons. As I'm showing here, there's the
Dragons weren't actually that big a deal.
I mean, they did a lot of devastation.
They were a big deal, but they didn't really move the needle
towards winning the war. It it was other factors.
And of course it was they didn't ever really win the war.
They temporarily declared victory.
Both of these stories, both Daron and Egon said, hey, I
guess I win. And then they were proven wrong
by what came next. But he did.
Daron did do some things smarter, like he showed that
navies might maybe are even better than Dragons, which goes
to show that Aegon should have done both.
Nina raises an idea here that isn't in the book, but could
have been. It may be something that was
discussed but didn't make the history books.
The kind of thing that you would expect would have been talked
about would have been maybe Aegon considering granting
primacy over Dorne to someone else.
Like making a deal with the Iron Woods, right?
The Iron Woods have always thought, even now as far as we
know, that they are superior to the Martels, that they deserve
to be the top spot in Doran. So with that in mind, and that's
a well known thing, I mean, after all, the Iron Woods did
split with the Martels during the Black Fires rebellions,
right? They were like, well, maybe this
is our chance to to to jump over the Martels.
Was that a consideration here against that argument is the
fact that Aegon doesn't work like that right.
He's that's more of a winning through politics.
He wants to win through strength.
He wants to dominate you in a way that shows he's stronger.
Not in a way that shows he's cleverer or smarter, although
he, I'm sure those things matter to him.
But number one is I'm stronger. And cutting deals to win a war
isn't. I mean is it's a form of
strength. It's political power.
But it's not that I beat you in the field idea that Aegon wants
to really establish that he really wants to drive home.
So maybe he thought about that idea of making the iron would
say, hey, Ironwood, take our side, be our man on the inside
and we'll make you top dogs. It may not have.
They may have abandoned the idea because they didn't think it
would work as well. Maybe the Iron woods, they just
the iron Woods of that era were not open to that sort of thing.
Like, no, we're Dornish, we're not turning on our own people.
Whereas that let you know 180 years later when dorm was
already part of the realm. It's a different consideration
for the Iron Woods of that era to join with the black fires
because you're really just picking one side of the
Targaryen family. You're not throwing them off
entirely, right? That's the difference here is
this is against other Dornish men, whereas it's more adorn
split in half during the black fire rebellions, they're more
fighting over the throne rather than each other.
So the Jordanes steward, in fact, when he surrendered the
third one, that may have even reminded them of the Tyrell
surrender of Highguards, like, well, maybe that's what I have
to do if if the top house isn't going to capitulate, I make
someone else the top house. That's kind of what happened in
the Riverlands too. He's like, well, the Heron the
black didn't capitulate house whore is gone now or almost
gone. So Tully's you're up next, you
get to be top dog now. So it's not like he hadn't done
sort of similar things elsewhere, but I'm not sure it's
what he wanted. I think he preferred to just
take on the top dog and have them bend the knee to him.
Let's talk about how he declared victory.
He continued east towards Sunspear, continuing to meet
basically no resistance. Or odd resistance.
He took major sights in his path, and here's what came next.
Farther east, Lord Tolland of Ghost Hill sent forth his
champion to challenge the king to single combat.
Aegon accepted and slew the man, only to discover afterward that
he had not been Tolland's champion, but his fool, Lord
Tolland himself, was gone. It's just weird, right?
I I don't get it right. It's strange.
I don't understand what they hope to accomplish by this,
right? But but start from the
beginning. Picture it.
A lot of Lords might have been sweating the stool like, Oh my,
our king who has no air. Don't forget is going to duel
someone. They might be a little anxious
about that. Some of them will be confident
because Aegon is just so strong and he is a great warrior.
They probably wouldn't. They might not have been too
worried, like they've never heard of this toll and champion.
Who is this guy? He's nobody more true than they
thought. He's really, truly nobody.
If if it were written, like with pros, it might start like Gregor
versus Oberyn or Strong Bell Wass versus the hero of Marine,
only for it to turn into a complete day.
You're like, wait, that wasn't Who was that?
That guy didn't look like he even knows how to fight.
How long did it take for them to figure out that he was the fool?
Like they didn't just realize that right away.
Like, Aegon wins and they're like, well, that was easy.
What's going on here? And what was it that took his
armor off and underneath there's motley.
Like what? What was the moment in which
they realized he was the fool? They might wonder.
Also, you know, it's the king. The Targaryen king is fighting a
duel against he. He it's a it's a fool.
So maybe they didn't watch because they knew what was going
to happen or. But maybe if they don't watch,
doesn't that kind of give away that something is up right?
Like, why aren't any Dornishman watching this duel?
And how does this come to play? Like did they just leave this
fool behind? Like, OK, fool, we got to get
out of here, but we need someone to stay behind to create a
distraction. But that doesn't make a lot of
sense. They knew Aegon was coming weeks
ahead of time. Probably.
So I just yeah, I don't. I don't really understand it.
Was it meant to to annoy Aegon? To embarrass him, to shame him
sometimes? Like, look at this.
He's killing fools. Look at how weak he is.
He's got to kill fools to make himself look strong because he
can't fight real warriors. Like yeah I really don't
understand. And and this is when they
changed their banner to a dragon chasing its tail it had been a
ghost because their ghost hill is their is their location.
So I yeah I still so when they so when they gather to
commemorate this trick of their brave fool.
What? What exactly are they
celebrating? Like that fool.
He sure did die pointlessly. Like, I don't.
I don't know what this accomplished.
I made a fool of him. I mean, it makes me think
honestly of the humiliation tactic they used in the season
of Fargo without any spoilers, with the idea that when you have
a powerful man, humiliating him and making him look a fool to
other people can really. It hurts more than you might
think because he's so proud. Yeah, he's so proud.
He's proud. Like his power is is a big part.
It's his power is a big part of his power.
But yeah, like, his status is a part of his power.
And yeah, I think it. Would, yeah.
Word would spread the Aegon duel to fool.
Yeah, duel to fool. But yeah, I think it would.
I think Dornishman probably sang songs about this.
This probably is a Dornish song about this exact thing.
It gives heart to their people. Yeah, I I I think that even if
it it doesn't stop things in its tracks, but it helps.
And yeah, so that's, Nina writes.
Maybe it's maybe, I'm assuming too much about their ability to
get away, Maybe they didn't have as much warning.
Or maybe, yeah, maybe he moved quickly and maybe they didn't
know for sure he'd come for them because he was heading for
Sunspear, and maybe they they gambled that he wouldn't bother
with them. So who knows?
Now, interestingly enough to there's the house Tallinn has a
dragon dreamer in their in their family right now, and it's kind
of a mystery how that happened. Well, there's possibilities, but
it is interesting. It's not like a it's not like a
completely impenetrable mystery. But it's it's interesting to tie
these these anecdotes together and and wonder if they're.
No, considering the Targaryens we have had, they've married
into Dorne. Yeah, it makes sense that
someone from that. A Martel Tolland matter.
Yeah, exactly. Rather the yeah, the Martel.
'S had a lot of children, so. Yeah.
So that that's my my choice, my theory there.
I just think it makes great sense that the Martels, the
Tolland would marry and the Targaryens share their blood
with the Dornish and so now they'll pop up around Dorn.
Potentially there's other houses that that could happen to it.
Yeah. And it really does open that
possibility up that could happen somewhere else, like other
Dornish house maybe or something here and there.
Yeah, it's pretty. Cool.
It's also true. I mean I guess any other, any
houses where like Targaryen has married into.
I think in that region the people like marriages they could
make. You could, you could speculate
that like that is the case there as well.
Yeah, and there's a couple other possibilities.
Yeah, maybe, yeah. Aegon.
Nina writes that fighting when Aegon finds out the champion was
a fool, he would look like a fool himself.
You know, like he was duped into this.
Whether or not like, there's multiple things that are
embarrassing about it, I guess. Yeah, maybe I maybe I
underestimated the embarrassment suffered by him.
I like your example of Fargo. That's a good one.
Yeah, didn't embarrass him. Yeah, yeah, He was very
embarrassed by that. It was like, it's a like a
regular person that's just like a it's like a prank, you know,
you're like, oh, that's funny. But like someone who's really
wrapped up in their own ego and their own reputation is so
important and respected and to have that to damage that damages
his his kingship Even. So yeah, pretty cool.
Pretty cool. But it is possible that this
fool was it says this guy's mad. He might have genuinely wanted
to fight egg on. Like, there's still the idea of
like, how do they get this guy to do it.
Like, even if they did the fool really.
Like, you can order a man to do it, but, like, how is he going
to, like, have the courage to actually do it?
You know, he might just be like, I'm too afraid of this man.
I know you're ordering me to do it, but I'm just going to run
away if I don't want to fight this guy.
He really did face him and die. So he's a fool.
He is a fool. But there is, you know, there
are a few real world examples of things like this.
There was a a knight in William the Conqueror's army, I believe
it was who. There's a story where this guy
just like launched himself at the opposing army by himself in
between like forays. Like the two armies were
separated and this guy just like launched himself forward and was
like naked or something. I can't forget all the details,
but he was just someone just went mad.
He charged by himself, and of course he died.
You know, it was just really weird.
But again, so many things that are weird that happened in
Westeros history. There's something just as weird
in a nearly identical way that happened in the real world and
which might in fact be the inspiration for that.
And we already have a legend of Florian the fool.
There's already a popular Westerosi legend, one of the
most popular stories, one of the most memorable, like Fables of
Westeros or Legends, whatever you want to call it.
I don't think they use the word fable, but still, it's a it's a
appropriate term. So Dorne is they know Flory the
Fool down in Dorne. I mean Tansel Tansel the Tall.
She puts on Flory the Fool as one of her puppet shows in the
Hedge Night. And yeah, and any fool can be a
great knight according to this legend.
So maybe this crazy fool was even thinking of himself as a
true Florian. Maybe they maybe they refer to
him as their Florian because we don't know what this guy's name
was. Florian Talland the mad fool.
He wouldn't have been a tall and probably, but Florian of the
Tallands, Yeah. So that's kind of cool.
Yeah. It's kind of neat little story.
It's both weird and interesting and and quirky and and just
yeah, it's kind of interesting that he even accepted the duel
in the 1st place, though. Not too surprising given he
wants to show himself as a Dominator and he had already
done it. He'd already dueled a few other
people like I think the most recent one had been at at
Valmark in the Iron Islands. Or maybe not Valmark.
Maybe Black tried to forget, but he fought one of those guys in a
duel in the Iron Islands during that episode.
I still think it is, by the way, a little odd.
Like, it may, may be even necessary, but it's a bit of a
risk. You know, He's got to really
think he's better than the best of maybe.
Never mind. Maybe it wasn't the same
reputation at that time, but maybe the fear of poisoning too.
You know, like maybe he just had enough confidence in his armor
and his blade and his training, and maybe there would have been
instructions for someone with the bow and arrow to like.
Yeah, I was something like. A blow from being dealt but.
Yeah, maybe there was like a yeah, I would have expected
maybe it was an assassination attempt.
And you know, they just, it's surprising how few or no
assassination attempts there are at this point given that there
will be lots later. So I wonder if they just like
flip the switch like, OK, we're not like this, but now we are.
But I don't, I don't really think so.
I mean they were totally willing to do night attacks and all
these other like guerrilla warfare stuff.
I don't know why they'd scruple to not try to murder the king or
one of the Queens. Well.
Maybe because they're afraid if they did that, he would
ruthlessly burn cities down. Yeah, but once they're
ruthlessly burning cities down anyway.
OK, fine. We're going to try to poison
you. I.
Agree, because I think their idea was to get them to leave.
And if you kill the king, they're not going to leave,
they're going to, they're going to, like you say, get really
vicious and bloody and murderous.
On the other hand, killing the king might end the war.
So there is like that's it's a calculated.
It might dream, it might attract 2 more dragon riders, yeah.
Exactly. Yeah.
Well, one was already there. So what the the other dragon
rider. Yeah, yeah, either way.
So and and from Aegon's perspective, like they continue,
they keep not facing him. Finally someone's willing to
fight him. You know, it's just a duel.
It's not an army, but it's something that he can go, all
right, I can. I'll win this.
It's something I can plant my flag in and be like, look,
here's a victory. It's me personally winning it.
I didn't send someone else to do it only for it to be
embarrassing because it was a fool.
So he's like, finally, all right, someone was going to
fight me, but oops. Nope, they not.
That happened. Maybe he convinced.
Maybe he was still convincing himself They were afraid at this
point and then at this point, OK, this isn't fear.
They're messing with me. They're trying to.
They're just doing asymmetrical warfare, which may be something
he wasn't that familiar with. He certainly didn't use that
term, asymmetrical warfare, but he started.
Maybe I wonder at which point he realized that this just wasn't
working, or whether they're not playing by quote UN quote, the
rules of warfare he was used to whether that would ultimately
result in some other outcome. Because as we're going to see,
he's just going to declare victory without really ever
beating the people he came to beat.
So it was said Lord Tallinn had gone away, right?
And all these other Lords before.
That quote continues here. As was Miriam Martell, the
Princess of Dorne, when King Aegon descended upon Sunspear on
Valerian to find his sister Rainey's there before him after
burning the planky town she had taken.
Lemon wood spots wood and stink water, accepting opiocence from
old women and children, but nowhere finding an actual enemy.
Even the Shadow City outside the walls of Sunspear was half
deserted, and none of those who remained would admit to any
knowledge of the whereabouts of the Dornish Lords and Princess.
The Yellow Toad has melted into the sands, Queen Rainice told
King Aegon. Aegon's answer was a declaration
of victory. Yeah.
So it's another example of overconfidence, quite possibly.
Like, they're thinking, well, we win, they didn't face us, so we
win. It's that simple.
We've got their capital. It's like capture the flag.
Like they left it sitting here, We took it, we win, Right.
Given the rules of warfare, they're used to that.
It's ingrained in their minds. This is a victory, but it's not.
Maybe it's just a political statement, like, well, they're
not. They refuse to admit they've
lost. So we're just going to loudly
declare victory because it's the best we can do.
What are we going to do? Say well I guess we didn't win
after all. What's he going to declare non
victory? I mean he's got to do something.
But as we've said Sean, in many different ways, running away
isn't giving up. They're still fighting.
It's just they're just not fighting Frontal warfare.
Nina brings up another real world example here.
King William the 3rd and the glorious Revolution.
Facing the invasion of his daughter and son-in-law, King
James the Second of England fled to France, which he threw the
Great Seal, which is like the the the royal Insignia.
He threw it into the Thames. He just threw it in the river.
William and his government thereafter decided to say that
by fleeing abroad and abandoning the Great Seal, he had advocated
like you. By doing that, you have declared
you're no longer the king. He they just took that as a sign
of capitulation. So they just like made-up a
rule. They're like if you do that,
that means you're not king anymore.
And a lot of people would buy that because against they're the
ones who have the voice, they're the ones making the narrative,
and no one else can argue with them.
They have the armies and the the voices and the pens and paper
making these declarations. Whether the other armies and
other kings and Lords and ladies agree with that, it's another
matter and the declaration isn't going to affect that over much,
although it may affect some people in the middle and what
side they take. So yeah, just better to it's
better than admitting that that they had their strategy was a
failure, better admitting that the Dornish had out manoeuvred
them, say hey, we're in your castle so we win.
It's a better optics, I guess, even though it's not necessarily
the truth. At the time, it would have felt
like the truth. It's easier again for us to look
at it with 2020 hindsight, but why would they not think they
won when they're in the Tack Castle?
Of their opponent, you know. So I guess it's because there's
still so many Dornish out there who had not capitulated.
But I guess the rest of Westeros doesn't know that.
Like from in the Stormlands, in the Reach and Taverns all around
Westeros. They all they're hearing is that
the king is in Sunspear now Like well he must have.
They might even assume some battle was won that he to do
that they might not have even they might not have heard the
part about no one was there, they just walked in.
That part might not have been part of the rumor, might just
have been some victory or other might have been assumed.
So in addition to this very sketchy declaration of victory,
Aegon's plan to rule Dorne afterwards also has some very
glaring red flags that I think a lot of you will identify right
away here in this quote. In the Great Hall at Sunspear,
he gathered together what dignitaries remained and told
them that dorm was now part of the realm, that henceforth they
would be his legal subjects, that their former Lords were
rebels and outlaws. Rewards were offered for their
heads, particularly that of the Yellow Toad, Princess Maria
Martel. Lord John Rossby was named
Castellano, Sunspear and Warden of the Sands to rule Doran in
the King's name. Stewards and Castellans were
named for all the lands and castles the Conqueror had taken.
Then King Aegon and his host departed back the way they had
come W along the foothills and through the Prince's Pass.
They had hardly reached King's Landing before Dorne erupted
behind them. Yeah, so this is what we were
saying before is that they were trying to lull Aegon into in
this, into declaring A premature victory and then leaving.
And then that would enable them to slaughter everyone he left
behind, which is exactly what happened.
Maybe Aegon thought he was clever, putting in Lord Rosby in
charge, because that's not a Stormlander, not a Reachman.
It's like, well, they won't hate him as much.
Yeah, they don't have grudges against Lords North of the
Blackwater, right? Actually, yeah, they they do.
Because he's an invader. Like it?
They might hate a Stormlander more, but it's like that million
degrees a day thing. It's still well over the bar for
hating him. Hating more doesn't make that
much difference. You know he's still an invader.
You know this man is not going to rule over them if they have
any say of it. And well, here's what happens.
Next quote. Dornish Spearman appeared from
nowhere like desert flowers after a rain sky Reach.
Ironwood, the Tor and Ghost Hill were all recaptured within a
fortnight, their royal garrisons put to the sword.
Aegons, Castellans and stewards were allowed to die only after
long torment. It was said that the Dornish
Lords had a wager over who could keep their captive alive the
longest whilst dismembering them.
Lord Rosby, Castellan of Sunspear and Warden of the
Sands, had a kinder end than most after the Dornish men
swarmed in from the Shadow City to retake the castle.
He was bound hand and foot, dragged to the top of the Spear
Tower and thrown from a window by none other than the aged
Princess Miria herself. This to me probably was a bit
like King Viserys killing the stag in House of the Dragon,
where it's just all set up for him and all he has to do is just
like stabbing. They're basically holding it in
place for him. This is probably what it was
like. Mary is again like in her 80s,
so she probably just like barely pushes him and they just like
they set him like, so he's able to topple right out, you know,
But it's pretty nasty. But these are unprovoked
invasions. These are home destroyers.
I mean these are this is vicious.
This is vicious versus vicious and and they're led by again,
ancestral foe, traumatic legends, right, Dornish, Roinar.
They're going to have sympathy for people who are opposing
Valyrians, Dragons, Targaryens on just on general principle.
This is an ancient enemy and they want to intimidate people,
intimidation, psychological warfare.
All this stuff is in place. This is part of their plan
because they can't win through the traditional conservative
frontal assault means they have to use what they have and this
is what they have. Like what happened to Ori's,
Baratheon's army. There was a psychological plan
in mind here. It wasn't just pure savagery.
It was savage strategy, strategy, savagery.
I don't know. There's a word in there
somewhere that can be made. It's sort of terrorism, you
know, like in in modern terms or modern rules of warfare or
whatever. A lot of what the both sides are
doing, honestly, I was going to say what would they have done
with that Rosby guy if they had had a grudge?
Again, what if he was a Reachman?
Yeah, that's that's the difference.
It makes like had a kinder end than most.
He only fell to his death. Yeah, he would have been if he
had been a Stormlander, A reachman.
Yeah. I think they might have tortured
him more, yeah. By the way, don't, don't blow
off that line bound hand and foot and dragged up the.
Can you imagine That's like literally being beaten with the
bat 1000 times, maybe. Like every step of your body
being smacked as you get no way to protect your face or
anything, you know? That would be awful.
Yeah, that's that's real bad. So it was called the
defenestration of Sunspear and the calendar had shifted to AC-5
by the time it happened. So we can roughly about a year.
I guess this portion of the war was maybe a little less,
certainly not two though. You got to give them some style
points and symbol points for that last one.
As gnarly as all this is Maria. Maria doing it herself giving
given all her infirmities and how old she is, like it, it
really shows that the Dornish will resist to the last and and
using different means than what would be accepted northwards,
right, like even the old women are in the fight is kind of what
it symbolizes. Even the old.
The oldish women who are in their society are perhaps the
weakest, which is not true, but they might see it that way.
Even they will stand up to these Knights, to these Lords of the
the other kingdoms. And that's how that's the face
that Doran puts on this, that they will resist.
Even the quote UN quote weakest of them will resist and fight
and this is what happens. So yeah.
So the farther South and West the Tyrell army under Lord
Harlan mobilized. Here's how we recall how
difficult things are in the hellhole.
We did an episode like you said Sean, hardcore houses.
Pretty recently we spoke of it in a few places besides that as
well. The Highgarden episode, it came
up a bit so and remember they that army already wasn't at full
strength. So that was a yeah, a bad time,
right. So they were already weakened by
who knows how much. And the corguiles,
interestingly, another hardcore house had never submitted at
all. No one ever came to them and
said, hey you give up now, right?
They were like, no, we're in the deep desert.
No one even bothered to come to us because we're so far off the
beaten path. So they were still like
attacking hell hold here and there sending raiding parties in
attacking their food supplies. But eventually they heard the
the Helholtz Tyrells heard about the defenestration got that
beaten up understaffed sick army and headed E to to go to Vaith
and vanished. I think you all remember this
one that that's been cited a few times.
So all of that army's gone, all of that Baratheon force gone.
A a part of Aegon's army destroyed as well because he had
some losses here and there. He didn't go through the deep
deserts and you know, but still they he left men behind his
garrisons, all of which were destroyed to a man.
So I'm going to guess that out of about 31,000 fighting men
that went into Dorne, only about 12,000 survived.
So about 19,000 or so died. Not to mention the officials,
tax collectors, all the other folks who came afterwards and
non combatants who also died during 'cause, you know, they
weren't the only ones, You know, it wasn't just the soldiers
dying of starvation and or rather of thirst and heat, some
of the camp followers as well, and just people sharpening the
weapons and providing the food. They would have been suffering
just as badly and maybe even worse 'cause this a lot of times
the soldiers are considered more important.
So yeah, all right, it's a decent spot to leave it the
ending of the army and the sort of finishing of the first
portion of this war. Next time up we'll start by
discussing some of the strategy and why some of these things
went wrong, both in terms of navies and Dragons.
And then get into the non traditional aspect of this war,
the part that lasted the longest, the assassinations, the
the subterfuge, the cloak and dagger, the really dirty and
savage and bloody and brutal portions of this war that are
really kind of unlike anything else in the history of Westeros.
It's very unique. Maybe only A Song of Ice and
Fire itself fits as a parallel to some of the stuff that we're
going to get into next time. You know when you talk about
1000 men trapped on a bridge getting butchered like pigs, and
then you say next time we're going to get into the really
brutal part, jeez. Yeah, I guess it's not really as
it isn't worse in that sense. It's just a different form of
brutal. It's a different brand of
brutal, yeah. It's more of more of the
murdering and torturing and. I would say it may even be more
brutal because people because those soldiers all were soldiers
going to war and you know, I guess maybe they didn't know
exactly volunteer for it, but a lot more innocent people get
destroyed. You know, we, I mean I guess it
was also pretty brutal to burn Plankey Town and you know all
these other things. So I do think that there is some
similarly brutal stuff coming up.
Yeah, I think so too. So if you like brutality, we've
got the stuff for you. Come back next time.
Well, there won't be a new recording.
Next week. We will be at Magfest in
Washington, DC. So if you're going to be there,
come. That is the Music and Gaming
Festival. That's right, to be clear.
Yes, mag, Just MAG. There's no other letter at the
end of that. Yeah, music and gaming.
So yeah, if you're in Maryland area, we will be there.
Hope to see you there. Yeah, we're driving on up.
That's right. So back in two weeks for the
second-half of the First Dornish War and the today's trivia
question. Remember, House Holland is now a
dragon chasing its tail, but it was a ghost for Ghost Hill.
That's right. Which is one of the only reasons
we know ghosts are a thing in all the Westeros, because the
only other ghost I can think of is John pretending to be a ghost
by covering himself in flower. So that clearly that's a thing
that he was trying to. Be and the word ghost of high
heart. Yeah, the word comes up.
You're. Right.
But I mean like the personification of a ghost.
Like what do they look like? Like we think of the sheet, you
know, the white. Sheet.
I think they look like a big white dire wolf.
With red eyes, it never makes a sound.
Oh yeah, so that's. Yeah.
So I so, I don't know. So when I picture a sigil of
ghost till I'm like, what does that ghost?
What did it look like? Was it like a Casper or was it
what does a Westerosi ghost? What image look like?
It was slimer. It was green.
Yeah, yeah, well, it's a green dragon on their new ones, so it
would be it would be consistent to have a green ghost.
So yeah. Other episodes that you might
want to check out to keep immersed on this topic include
Nymeria, both one episodes, one and two.
One day we'll do the third one, which is her conquest of Dorn
itself. The first two are the different
phases of the Roinish Odyssey. Daron the first, the Young
Dragon. We've got an episode on him.
We talked about him a few times. This episode we mentioned the
Highgarden episode. We mentioned hardcore houses a
couple times. But there's so many other
Targaryen related episodes and Doran related episodes you could
find in our catalogue. Anything from Ancient Doran all
the way to episodes about Valyria and Valyria Targaryen
related houses like House Valerian and House Celtic are.
And of course, don't forget the Last Storm episode, available
for patrons and members only, and the Red Kraken episode,
which takes place during the Dance of the Dragons and is such
a story that functions on its own that we decided to tell that
tale separately. It's a it's a bonus episode, and
we did it with Radio Westeros alongside the rest of our Dance
of the Dragon series, which is available to everyone.
Yes, right, Red Kraken and Last Storm episodes.
Good example of bonus scripted episodes you get by joining us
on Patreon, and thanks to those of you who do support us there.
And on Spotify, you get those bonus episodes if you're a
Spotify subscriber as well. Thanks again to Nina for the
great notes. Lots of great takes on politics
and parallels and history. I have a cat in my lap
currently. Oh, look at that.
Yeah, she's black, so we can't tell very well.
That's a camo cat right there. Well, even when you do that,
it's hard to tell. She's.
There, Yeah, People asked. So there you go.
I'm glad to see our live viewers want more cat action, 'cause we
do too, if you like it when you all remind us.
I think the cats like it too. They know somehow they know that
there's a live audience. I don't.
Know if you can hear her purring, they're close to the
speaker. Cool.
Well, everybody, I hope you have a excellent week.
We appreciate you listening and being a part of our community.
Thanks as well to Michael Clark Feld and Joey Townsend and Jesse
and Bran. Everyone who helps us with the
music and audio and maps and all the great stuff that helps make
our show look more professional. We will see you next time and
you know what to do until then. I say it every time.
I'm not going to stop Val R Reread us.
The.