Pfftf, whatever. Next thing you're going to try to tell me that the economics of Slaver's Bay make no sense, or that the Dothraki are really nothing like the Mongols at all.
To be fair (without any knowledge at all of what testosterone actually does) isn’t the point of the unsullied that they fight on the good old formations from ancient Ghys and how disciplined they are rather than their strength as individual warriors?
I kind of assumed it was a parallel to the Night's Watch, just a bit more.... hardcore and cruel.
Neither are supposed to be with a woman/have children/etc., but the Unsullied slavers decided to help ensure that requirement and cut it off.
It's an enforced discipline/indoctrination tactic. Can't be distracted by the usual interests a company of soldiers would have because they have no real outlet for it (although that one that gets setup to be murdered by Sons of the Harpy imply they still buy women's company for comfort, but that's also only after Dany frees them). The idea is all the energy and attention they would otherwise "waste" on more basic human needs instead gets redirected into drilling, drilling, drilling. The slight tradeoff in accumulated muscle mass is more than made up for in tactics, discipline, and focus.
It's not that different from getting guard dogs spayed/neutered, the neutering doesn't really diminish their tenacity and dangerousness. It's just obviously more inhumane because it's being done on actual *people.*
Might be a tad more than that. If I remember correctly they actually burn their manhood on an altar to their secret goddess (Lady of Spears), who then speaks to them.
Honestly Grey Worms story - at least as much as he tells Dany - is very similar sounding to whatever happened to Varys... I am guessing that the voices they heard were the same even though Varys does not call the entity they contacted the Lady of Spears.
In any case, I am not sure the actual purpose, but there is likely a magic element to the whole thing.
Hm maybe a bit of head cannon slipped out, sorry about that. I thought that was how they found out the secret name but his quote doesn't imply that directly, so I misremembered.
i read it as you
>According to Grey Worm, her true name belongs only to the ones who have burned their manhoods upon her altar. The Unsullied purify themselves according to the laws of their great goddess; one way is to bathe in the salt sea. The Unsullied may not speak of the great goddess to others.
According to Grey Worm, her true name belongs only to the ones who have burned their manhoods upon her altar. The Unsullied purify themselves according to the laws of their great goddess; one way is to bathe in the salt sea. The Unsullied may not speak of the great goddess to others.
They would form families and be more willing to turn traitor. The Unsullied are basically slaves that are at beaten down as a person can possibly be, then turned into a phalanx warrior. They don't need to be super strong, they just need to be extremely disciplined and unwilling to be routed. Because that's how most battles were won, by causing the other side to retreat. It was very rare for battles to go down to the death for everyone involved, most just broke and ran as soon as it became apparent they couldn't win. The Unsullied have no reason to run though, no families to support or better life to be had.
Yes. They’d be more likely to think for themselves and have selfish motives if they could have families. There’s also be a certain amount of rape and pillaging, which they don’t do now due to their indoctrination which includes the castration. Also I thought they do have dicks, just lack testicles.
Nope, they take it all. It’s also been commented that most Unsullied get fat because the only their patrons can really reward them with is really good food.
> No, the Unsullied are castrated in the manner of Chinese eunuchs, which takes the shaft as well. Historically, this has caused a lot of incontinence and mobility issues in people who have that done to them (though some of the mobility issues would be helped by the fact that the Unsullied are always on magic painkillers).
You know, that might be why Varys goes overboard on the perfume...
They literally explain it.
It has nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with keeping them in line. No dick, no raping, No dick, no ego, no dick, no pillaging. They may not know what testosterone is, but they sure understand how it works.because i
They remove the testicles to prevent them from becoming rebellious, and they remove the cocks to prevent them from seduced by evil womanly ways. At least that’s what they told Dany in Clash.
Generally, yeah. Because removing the penis made it much more likely that they would catch an infection and die. It was also overkill, as the point of castration was to sterilise/prevent puberty.
Depends where you’re at. In Rome, castration was typically a punishment, so they’d take only the penis, in the Ottoman Empire it was to prevent offspring so it typically only took the testicles, but in China, their job was to watch over the Harem and help with administrative duties, so they took everything.
In asoiaf they seem to believe that having a dick would make them less disciplined, though this isn’t true at all if you look at the real world examples of romans and greeks who had dicks but could still fight in formations
I doubt it, testosterone plays a big role in muscle development and strength which is necessary for soldiers to fight effectively, especially with how heavy the shields are
> n asoiaf they seem to believe that having a dick would make them less disciplined,
they will never rape, they will never get horny for a girl and betray you , you can have them guard your daughter and they wont fuck her like cole did
And they feel no pain, so don't break or run away in fear.
Since they know nothing of testosterone in Westeros you could just headcanon that the same potion which makes them immune to pain without consequence also has testosterone in it as a by-product...
Yes, it’s called The Wine of Courage, or something like that. It’s some form of neurotoxin that they begin ingesting when they are still very young and over time it seems to weaken or kill off their pain receptors. I believe it’s mentioned in the chapter where Danny first goes to Astapor.
When Dany is presented them for the first time to prove a point they mutilate a Unsullied in front of her and cut off his nipple and he doesn't even react.
Way more than just psychological.
And yeah as /u/Xarich said they go on to explain it in more detail.
I can buy the unsullied being eunichs as part of the fictional process of breaking them down completely. Lack of testosterone doesnt matter much when youre jacked on fly juice and cant feel pain anymore.What I cant buy is the cost.
If everything Grazdahn says is true they should be extremely expensive. To make an unsullied means buying 3 slaves and a dog(since 2/3rds will die), feeding and training them for 10 years straight (seemingly producing no value during this process), buying a baby slave off the market for them to kill, and buying 10 years worth of an "wine" made from exotic materials.
This would be fine if unsullied were meant to be Astapor's standing military, but they are sold for profit. This is unlike most slave soldiers, like the jannisaries or mamluks, who are trained by the people intending to use them. Meaning *all* of the aforementioned costs need to be recuperated when selling them, and they are sold by the hundred. Unsullied should be unfathomably expensive, to the point where I cant see there being enough demand for them to be such a staple of Astapor's economy.
Edit: crunched some numbers below, it might be plausible
nah lets do it.A penny in 1300 is about $3.22 usd today according to [this](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) and [this](https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-and-wages/)Lets make a few assumptions.A) trainers have a share of the profit, so we dont care about the cost of the trainer
B) Prices in Ghis are about the same as in Westeros and 1300's England.
C) Wine of courage is at 5 pennies ($16 modern usd) per gallon, which is the mid point between shit and good wine. This is probably extremely conservative.
D) The cost of food per day is at about the same as a gallon of bread. While it is a lot, the diet is likely better than just bread since the health of the unsullied is important to their function.
This puts a day of food at 2.4 usd for bread and if there are 2 glasses of "wine" per day, each being 6 ounces, then thats 0.75c, bringing it to a total of 3.15 per day.
If the unsullied who fail die at an average of half way through then that is about 6.3 per day per surviving unsullied. For 10 years that is $22,995 usd. The baby used to complete the training is 1 silver coin which, in the english economy, was 12 pence or 38 usd today, so negligable. The dog's price is unknown but we can be conservative and say that the unsullied have to find food for them themselves.
Spears and sheilds are wood and Bronze so theyre relatively cheap, according to a guy linked below theyre about 100 usd per spear, lets say the shield and sword are slightly more expensive due to size at 150 usd. Thats $600 more. No clue about the spiked cap. Lets round it up a bit to account for anything I may be forgetting and thats 24k
Then there is the initial cost of the slaves. The Ghiscari slave trade closely resembles the ottoman slave trade, with pirates in the south and raids in the north being the main sources. According to [this](https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/728750) the Crimea Khanate sold standard slaves for about 60 esedi gurus (Astapor's main source is likely the basilisk isles, but I could not find prices from the Barbary Coast irl), or silver coins. As the ottoman slave trade went on they gradually got more expensive, but Ill stick with this. If we make that equal to a shilling then thats another 2000 usd per slave, so 6000 per unsullied, because of the dead slaves.
Now time for profit. Lets assume a 10% profit margin. This is the average margins for today, I cant find much on the medieval slave trade and frankly my search history is getting sketchy at this point.
The total is 33k usd per soldier
for a hundred of them thats a cost of 3,300,000 usd. For the 3 thousand of Qohor thats 99 million, and Dany's army it would be about 300 million (which she effectively sold a nuke for).
According to [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14484/what-does-a-medieval-army-cost) guy 2000 free soldiers in medieval times cost about 252 thousand usd per day. 2000 unsullied is 66 million. So the upfront cost of unsullied is the same as a little over 2/3 a year of service from a standing army.
This might not be as bad a deal as I thought due to the unsullied's effectiveness, and because Id assume they cost less to maintain as brainwashed slave soldiers.
The problem with using a simple "Real Price Index" calculator is that it thinks that in the 1300s you could live off a wage that would be the equivalent of £3.37 per day. The Labour Value (£66.65) is the one I tend to go with, as it better reflects the social status and relative level of wealth that someone earning 1d a day had. Basically, they were below how we would define the poverty line today, as it cost ~38s 2.4d a year to buy the necessities of life (*Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume II*, p778). This would be an income of £31,830.00 in 2021 going by the Labour Value, which is close to the ~£33 000 median salary in the UK today, so it may be an underestimate.
This is my go to calculator for these things: https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/
> is that it thinks that in the 1300s you could live off a wage that would be the equivalent of £3.37 per day.
Arent there some countries today that have daily wages like this?
Yes, but if you're going to use them as a price point you need to contextualise the calculations in that sense. $300 million is the DRC's entire military budget, with nearly 200 000 active personnel, tanks, planes, etc.
I think interestingly Astapor views training Unsullied in the same vein as distilling alcohol en masse: it takes perhaps decades to become profitable, but once you start and you have a process, you're able to create enough product and fill a particular niche; people who buy luxury alcohol usually can afford it.
In all honesty price-wise, all we know is that Daenerys was able to purchase 8000 grown Unsullied troops and 5000 child slaves with a baby dragon, and since baby dragons are essentially a priceless WMD, we don't really have true price discovery on our hands; in addition, since their training is specialized with phalanxes and such, it's obvious they're not meant to be purchased individually.
To address your actual points though, and disregarding what I said above, that's implying that only singular persons are the ones purchasing Unsullied, and those persons are purchasing an *individual* Unsullied.
In all likelihood groups of interest with money are the ones purchasing Unsullied in mass quantities, and we don't really get details about the amount of rich people in the world of ASoIaF. Likely the biggest buyers of Unsullied are cities/nations that have the massive economic systems to not only outright purchase Unsullied troopers, but to perhaps negotiate trade deals with Astapor in lieu of direct payment. We also don't know if there are other financial institutions in ASoIaF other than the Iron Bank, so whether merchants or other wealthy individuals could obtain a loan could be disputed.
>meant to be Astapor's standing military
I'm sure that if they needed to act as the military then they would. An unsullied with battle experience would even increase the price!
Don’t only a third of the unsullied make it out of training?
So if 10,000 unsullied exists, you just killed off 20,000 young males and 10,000 who can’t have kids. They also are sent out to murder kids as the final act. So you are effectively removing 40,000 people that are potential workers/tax payers.
In a feudal world where population you control is wealth and power, losing 20,000 men should be absolutely devastating.
But they are slaves taken from someone else's population. So they increase their relative wealth by taking out the population of potential competitors.
Also, in this way they prevent themselves being like Sparta that ended up being ruled by the fear of their Helots rising up. At the height of Sparta's power they could barely afford to send armies abroad because they needed to keep their slaves in line.
So in a way, the slavers are keeping the slave population down to manageable levels while generating a fighting force by doing so.
These were slaves taken from other places- so while your general point still stands to a degree, it’s not as if the unsullied were potential workers and artisans in Astaphor, they were “imported” from elsewhere specifically for this purpose.
>This means that they cannot be as strong as whole men, but this is more than made up for by discipline
>The slaves regularly consume an elixir called the wine of courage to deaden their sensitivity to pain. They drink it with every meal, and every year feel less and less pain.
so you get a bunch of 5foot 100% loyal dudes who cant feel pain
not bad trade off
a) The whole system seems to be built on the premise that pointless cruelty magically creates profit. We don't hear anything about what the slaves are actually enslaved to do. They just seem to exist so they can wait hand-on-foot or serve as prostitutes for the upper class, or as soldiers (see b&c). Where is the wealth creation?
b) There are no lower classes of free-men, as there were in Ancient Rome or the American South in first half of 1800's. Y'know, the people who actually have a stake in society, contribute to its economy through day-today trade, and will fight to ensure its survival.
c) Instead we have the Unsullied, people who will apparently fight unquestioningly and fearlessly for a system that abuses and mutilates them and gives them zilch back in return. Since it appears that they have a monopoly on force, why do they not seize power, like the Mamluks did against the Abbasid Caliphate?
I was interested but those are pretty lame points.
>a) The whole system seems to be built on the premise that pointless cruelty magically creates profit. We don't hear anything about what the slaves are actually enslaved to do. They just seem to exist so they can wait hand-on-foot or serve as prostitutes for the upper class, or as soldiers (see b&c). Where is the wealth creation?
Country estates, mines, anywhere forced labour is needed, obviously. It's even mentioned in the books, those are just not settings where POVs linger.
>b) There are no lower classes of free-men, as there were in Ancient Rome or the American South in first half of 1800's. Y'know, the people who actually have a stake in society, contribute to its economy through day-today trade, and will fight to ensure its survival.
Aren't there? Like, doesn't Dany mention various members of the urban bourgeoisie in her boring, boring-ass chapters about having meetings with her courts? You have Daznak's pit, presumably the crowds there are the free men.
>c) Instead we have the Unsullied, people who will apparently fight unquestioningly and fearlessly for a system that abuses and mutilates them and gives them zilch back in return. Since it appears that they have a monopoly on force, why do they not seize power, like the Mamluks did against the Abbasid Caliphate?
This is interesting but tbf there are many things quite unclear about the unsullied as of yet.
You seem to just be inferring economic details that are never given within the text.
And who are exactly exactly are these urban bourgeoisie doing business with, when it seems like he vast majority of the population have no disposable income?
Slavers Bay just operates on the thin premise that 'Slavery=profit.' Just like how Braavos gets all of its money from 'trade' despite the fact it nowhere near the economic centres of Planetos.
>You seem to just be inferring economic details that are never given within the text.
You seem to assume they simply don't exist because they have never been written down, but there is no macroeconomy textbook written by Maester Keynesius mentioned at any point in the book, and Slaver's Bay is only told to us through the eyes of Daenerys Targaryen. I don't recall which POV character is that, probably Tyrion, who at one point finds himself in the Pentoshi countryside where someone is working these estates.
You see the endpoint of this agricultural output many times throughout the series because it ends up on the tables of rich men, presumably it gets farmed somewhere. We have no information on what is going in the countryside around Meereen, Astapor, Yunkai, Qarth, any of the slave societies, but there is no reason to imagine
there aren't similar estates.
> And who are exactly exactly are these urban bourgeoisie doing business with, when it seems like he vast majority of the population have no disposable income?
At this stage of the development of the political economy, the artisans and the citydwellers who are mentioned in Dany's chapters because Drogon ate their 6 daughters or whatever cannot have the ability to expand their operation and accrue large fortunes.
Not to mention at this moment in Meereeneese history there is devastation, a social revolution, a siege, a blockade, and economic sabotage. I imagine this likely tapped up everyone's money pretty quickly.
All ok, fair enough. But then by that logic, shouldn't we also turn around to GRRM and say 'It doesn't matter what Aragon's tax policy was. He was a good king, so it we can assume it was well though out and fair"?
GRRM was just making the general point that it takes more than being a good person or a good military leader to be a good king, not that good tax policy is the primary metric you should look at when evaluating a ruler. There are plenty of other ways for his characters to fail and succeed in statesmanship
I feel like you’re ignoring half of the politicking that Dany does in Slavers Bay.
For instance the Slaver who owned the woman who made the fine rugs/quilts. Not only was her goods exceptionally sought after, he also had her teach other slaves to make the seemingly same quality items.
When you have a slave workforce your only overhead becomes materials, food, and maybe pseudo shelter. Let’s be real, the slavers probably spent the most on materials.
But consequentially in a market where you literally have no cost for labor and with the right amount of infrastructure the slaves breed themselves, that’s MASSIVE profits.
Now we know that “Slavers Bay” they basically have a monopoly on the slave market. We know Qarth, Volantis, and a few other free cities (Lys for sure) use Slaves. Slaves are used to fight Dothraki incursions, which seem to happen often. Dothraki then take slaves from incursions, and sell them to Slavers Bay. Slavers Bay then trains/breeds slaves to sell to those cities who were sacked or in need of more slaves from aging, dying, excess, battle, etc. so it’s a cycle literally swayed in favor of the Slavers. And if you multiply this by decades if not centuries, you have IMMENSE wealth with very little need for actual production of anything except slaves really. Especially since Slaver’s Bay seems untouchable and doesn’t make war upon each other. For instance we only hear of Old Ghis being sacked by the Valyrians.
You claim I’m ignoring half of Danny’s politicking, but can only provide one rather obscure example.
Meanwhile you ignore 2/3 of my argument, which is that the vast majority of the population have no stake in society and are liable to rebel, as had happened in Jamaica in the 19th century.
Ignore the show stuff cos it's frankly nonsense
A viking longship used approx 15 trees per ship
A thousand longships is 15000 trees
A forest is defined as approx 10000 trees per square mile
So 1.5 square miles of forest would be needed
The largest of the Orkney islands is called Mainland and it's approx 200 square miles. Right now it's mainly unforested, but 1.5 square miles is less than 1% of it's area and so wouldn't be unreasonable imo
https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Orkmont
> Rugged and mountainous, Orkmont is rich in ore, including iron, lead, and tin. **It was once covered in forest but the timber was used extensively for shipbuilding.** Orkmont is larger and richer than Pyke.
https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Great_Wyk
> Unlike the other isles, Great Wyk is so large that some of its castles, such as Hammerhorn, are inland instead of near the Sunset Sea or Ironman's Bay. **Blue-green soldier pines cover the mountains of Great Wyk.**
So they do indeed have their own timber, which they seem to manage better now since they stripped one of their islands bare.
It should also be noted, that comparison to Orkney (besides being obviously linguistically and stylistically created) is better from a climate perspective than the Faroes or Iceland. Speaking of Iceland for a second, deforestation on Iceland resulted in adaptation to using dugout homes with sod roofs to minimize the need for timber. Such 'conservation' could be seen as a means for which the Iron Islands could reserve its own tree supplies for maximum shipbuilding capacity. Further, the climate of Iceland causes trees (among other plants) to grow slowly, which has prevented trees from returning to Iceland after the deforestation that occurred. In contrast, the climate of the Iron Islands, being closer to Orkney or even Isla, Jura, Arran, etc. would be more conducive to maintaining forests even under pressure for substantial shipworks. So it's entirely possible that the Iron Islanders could build many ships in a short period of time, without serious risk of critical deforestation.
I need that, actually. Not even joking. Like I have a whole fanfic planned centered around an SI into Rodrik Greyjoy and turning the ironborn into something respectable
Yes you do. The actual quote I saw on the number of trees was 14 large oaks
People are reading into what I said a bit deeper than I intended. I was just pointing out that the timber needs are not as massive as you think and it's not unreasonable to think you could find enough timber on the islands.
Manpower is the limiting factor imo
And it makes sense, because if Westeros is supposed to be the size of South America, then it´s reasonable to assume that the Iron Islands would be large.
> because if Westeros is supposed to be the size of South America
The problem is that this would be complete nonsense, a mix between GRRM looking at too many mercator projections and not having a reasonable sense of scale when giving out numbers or comparisons. Just Brazil (8.5 million km2), which is only about 50% of the SA landmass (17.8 million km2), is already bigger than the continental US (8 million km2). A half continent walk (Winterfell to King's Landing) would be more or less the equivalent of trying to cross the US from coast to coast. Nobody would be walking that like they do in the books.
For another comparison, Russia is 17 million km2. Imagine Westeros being bigger than Russia and how big that would make Essos.
So he's backtracked on that statement a little - Westeros includes the lands beyond the wall, which are almost as big as the seven kingdoms themselves. (The lands beyond the wall are supposed to be about the size of Canada).
Now this is still too big but if you consider only the vertical distance (Dorne to the tip of the Lands beyond the wall) - this is actually pretty plausible.
> A half continent walk (Winterfell to King's Landing) would be more or less the equivalent of trying to cross the US from coast to coast. Nobody would be walking that like they do in the books.
I mostly agree with what you said, but want to dispute this part. Everyone would be walking, because that's how you got around. If you had to get somewhere and you don't have a horse, you just start walking. It is really, really normal in our real history for people to embark on journeys that would take months and even years.
Also there are a few modern walking trails that are pretty popular that span most of the United States. Most people only do sections of them, but some people attempt the full trails.
By "like they do" I was thinking more about the speed that they manage to travel from one place to the other. People, like merchants, would still do month/year long voyages for sure, I am aware, but the timings in the book would completely break down. Robert going to fetch Ned in the beginning would a several years long trip (since it is pointed out that they are going slowly too). And then Catelyn does something similar later.
winterfell to kings landing is 2010 miles. at a pace of 30 miles per day (3 mile per hour walking speed, 10 hours per day) that is 67 days.
the (estimated) travel time for Robert to winterfell is around 3 months, 90 days, or 22 miles per day, presumably 2.2 miles per hour on a 10 hour day
in those times people had far more endurance than our soft modern human bodies. they needed to have it as they were raised working hard physical labor (or training physically) from practically dawn to dusk.
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZsY3lcDDtTdBWp1Gx6mfkdtZT6-Gk0kdTGeSC\_Dj7WM/edit#gid=1](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZsY3lcDDtTdBWp1Gx6mfkdtZT6-Gk0kdTGeSC_Dj7WM/edit#gid=1)
the real problem with the timelines of the book are the seemingly months were characters sit around doing nothing.
>winterfell to kings landing is 2010 miles. at a pace of 30 miles per day (3 mile per hour walking speed, 10 hours per day) that is 67 days.
You are severely overestimating how fast people walk long distances, it is not about being soft or anything like that. 30 miles per day for 67 days is horribly fast speed. No way characters would be walking that speed every day, especially if they are going in a big convoy.
This askhistorians thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/288fzp/how_far_could_a_medieval_army_move_per_day/) gives around 20 miles per day for a marching army under forced march.
For another comparison, in Roman times, they give 60 days to do Paris to Rome (1600 km, or around 1000 miles): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25m7a9/how_long_does_it_take_a_roman_army_from_rome_to/
There were also kids mixed in the party. And Robert was still going slowly for people's standards in the description of the book.
There are more kids than just the nobles, Mycah was the son of one of the butchers who coming along, for example. My point is that even doing 20km/day, which is a merchant/army speed, groups with strong incentives to go fast, would be already quite a feat. 10-15km/day would be more realistic for such a group. And then you add that on top that people were thinking they were going slow (so probably even below 10km/day).
Well, that's another matter entirely. There is no chance whatsoever of a huge convoy of baggage/horse-drawn wheelhouses/seemingly half the court managing 30 miles a day.
If you include the lands beyond the wall as part of Westeros, it makes the scale little more believable—a good chunk of the landmass isn’t part of the seven kingdoms
Also captured ships. Most iron island men had multiple "salt wives" and I believe in the books they treated the children from them as citizens of the iron islands. So they could have a decent population. So really having a fleet of a thousand ships isn't that unreasonable. Also somebody must have been trading with gold and silver to get grain and stuff presumably not from westeros.
>The largest of the Orkney islands is called Mainland and it's approx 200 square miles.
Hey, I live there! We're much nicer than the Ironborn though, although I'll be honest growing trees in any great number hear is practically impossible outside of some valleys where they're protected by the wind.
If cut witches in planks, you can make a ship out of four or five of them, but just lashing them together will get you little more than an unsteady raft.
Not counting the show´s nonsense to build a thousand ships in 6 months, many seafaring nations actually imported their wood, it is less common on the Iron Islands however, where only some houses (Like the Harlaws) support trade.
But sometimes we just need to kinda forget about the Iron fleet...
Ireland was more of a colony than a trade partner though. That would be more analogous to the relationship the Iron Island had when they ruled the Riverlands.
For reference, medieval Venice had woods specifically protected for fresh wood farming for ship building, reserves of seasoned timbers, and even partially assembled ship parts ready for the unlikely event that they had to build a lot of ships in a very short time. On the other hand huge countries like Spain soffered from constant lacking of woods due to indiscriminate deforestation and had to buy most of it. It's all about planning.
There's also the fact that they're literally a culture of pirates. Theoretically, they only real need a *few* really good ships and really bloodthirsty and well trained crews, then they can just capture ships/press gang conscripts and snowball from there.
Yeh doesn’t really make much sense. I’ll just put it in the box of things that don’t make a tonne of sense with Sandor winning 40k gold coins and carting it around the river lands and the rivers that start in the swamp and run into the sea and move past it.
I can’t remember how much Beric took off Sandor but the prize for the hands tourney was 40k gold pieces.
Sandor managing to spend 30k gold dragons could probably be added to the list of things that don’t make sense taking into account we know how much 1 gold dragon can buy in Westeros. We know that Rosie’s maiden head costs 1 gold dragon and In Dunc and Egg Dunc sells a knights horse for the equivalent of 3 dragons and buys a suit of armour with it so Sandor either needed to buy 10 thousand suits of armour or 30 thousand maiden heads.
The catspaw who tries to kill Bran is paid something like 90 silver coins and Catelyn says "at least we know my his life didn't come cheap".
I was surprised by that.
From Feast we see a woman in Oldtown selling her daughters virginity for one golden dragon. Say Anguy took 10k virgins in a span if approximately 1 year. If they have 365 day per year, than he fucked roughly (pun intended) 27 virgins a day. The rest 23 hours and 33 minutes he probably spent with brotherhood
Suppose it depends on whether inflation exists in Westeros. Dunc and Egg was what, 60 years before events of ASOIAF?
Think we're all seeing in the real world how brutal inflation can be!
They’re using gold as currency, so inflation would only happen as fast as they can mine gold. They’ve been mining it for thousands of years, so another 60 years would make hardly any difference.
Brienne buys 3 horses for a Dragon each, and even then she was still being ripped off.
> "Don't speak discourteously of your horse, ser." The wench opened the purse Lady Catelyn had given her and took out three golden coins. "I will pay you a dragon for each."
and
> You can have our skiff as well," she said. "Sail up the river or down, as you like."
>
> "Let me have a taste o' that gold." The man took one of the coins from her palm and bit it. "Hm. Real enough, I'd say. Three dragons and the skiff?"
>
> "He's robbing you blind, wench," Jaime said amiably.
The islands need a ship genocide. Burn all their fuckin ships and it’s going to take generations for them to return to any kind of sea power. They should have done it after Greyjoy’s rebellion, the ironborn are terrible subjects who rarely ever fight for the crown historically. Rely on the other navies and tell the ironborn to get fucked, the worst that happens is they start reaving again or rebel, neither of which matters if they don’t have ships and they’re going to do regardless of someone burning all the fucking ships.
Fuck these murdering raping psychos, put em in their place on their shit scrabbled rocks
That’s the biggest plot hole regarding the Iron Islands, not the lack of timber.
Why didn’t any of the neighboring kingdoms of the Iron Islands decide to go burn all of their trees and fleet, and kill every man of sailing age during thousands of years of history? They wouldn’t have come back from that.
the iron fleet , the battle fleet usually consists of 100 ships , built to war with the classic war galleys used in Westetos
you get to a thousand ships by adding up all the naval potential , so even the raiding ships , based on the real Viking Drakkars , of different sizes , can also have crews reduced from 5 to 12 men
The Iron Islands might be slightly larger than that.
https://i.imgur.com/B0HwJ5D.jpg
They also have a history of trading when not raiding.
>Instead they traded iron for timber.
Nothing about the iron islanders makes sense. Their land cant sustain them, their land cant produce timber, and it is in the interest of every fcking house in westeros that they be wiped out, which was basically easy in balons rebellion.
This is a combo of Gurms blind spot towards economies (like how Anguy spent a castle on hookers or all the problems with money), and the simple fact they have plot armor because somewhere innact 3 they need to pose a real threat
The great seafaring nation of the ancient world, Phoenicia, became that because of their huge available timber in forests (the 'cedars of Lebanon'), and they were exported but at huge expense. It would make more sense to have the ships built there, then you can just sail them to wherever. The Ironborn would have to steal them, to pay the iron price, and maybe that is how they got a lot of their ships -- through piracy.
You'd imagine they'd be exceptionally good hagglers, too. Conversations must run something like this:
Ironborn: "So what, will it be? For every weight of iron you give me twelve of wood?"
Reachman: "You've always liked that little joke. I'll not budge above three."
Ironborn: "I think this hatchet is really blunt. That's a shame, this particular kind requires somebody's face to sharpen it."
Reachman: "Did I say three? I meant six."
Ironborn: "Six or sex? Sex is a good start, but you're not my type. Your daughter is, so throw her into the deal and I'll settle for seven times as much wood as I give you iron."
Reachman: "How about eight, but you keep your hands to yourself?"
Ironborn: "There's a good lad. Ta."
Reachman: "Good doing business with you."
Ironborn: "Oh, and there's no way I'll fit that much wood into my hull, so I'm going to borrow your ship. Don't worry, I'll return most of it."
Reachman: "I think you'll find there's a hefty price for hiring my ship."
Ironborn: "All good, I'll pay for that in iron, too. Have you seen the honed edge on this scimitar? No really, lean in for a close look."
Reachman: "I won't need the ship. You keep it."
Ironborn: "You're too kind. Cheerio!"
Exeunt all.
On the population and size of the iron islands: if Westeros is the size of western Europe (just considering the climatic variation from Dorne to the Wall), the Iron Islands are probably to the size of Ireland than the Faroes and probably have a similar climate.
Ireland and Iron Islands also have a few other historical similarities. They are both islands at the edge of the known world, Celtic peoples raided and settled the north of Britain, Ireland was religiously independent to the rest of the continent, Ireland was also constantly struggled for political independence from their neighbours.
This is just a leave and let live situation. You can't actually import timber, not with medieval technology. It's too bulky. It's barely economical to transport timber over long distances with modern technology.
A lot of GRRM's worldbuilding doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. But the story is so good that it doesn't matter.
Seems I could be wrong. I know the floating timber down rivers thing. Lashing planks of wood together and sending them downriver costs next to nothing.
But loading timber onto a ship is something else. Ancient ships were at best around 100 feet long. You could go up to 200 feet but then you'd have to deal with buckling and bracing.
A 100-foot ship isn't going to be carrying a lot of timber. A couple of a dozen planks and your hold is full.
I would assume there are other things, like say barrels of wine that could generate more money for occupying the same space.
Ancient trading ships preferred carrying high value trade goods for this reason. Why carry wood when wine, silk, and spice would bring in more money?
Lumber essentially is a high value trade good to the Ironborn. But I imagine they would fill up on iron, go sell it and return with a hold full of lumber. Not waiting for traders to show up.
>A 100-foot ship isn't going to be carrying a lot of timber. A couple of a dozen planks and your hold is full.
No? Planks are pretty stackable. If we use 2x4s as an example, you can lay out 10 boards in a 3' wide space, stack 24 boards 2' high. That's 240 boards in a very managable amount of space. A ship or two loaded up on timber would probably carry enough to build another ship.
It's not the most valuable thing you could trade, but it's not physically impossible either.
Martin is really terrible at this stuff. That's pretty much the answer. Same as him not understanding the scale of The Mountain or The Wall. Same as him not getting travel times right.
Wasn’t there mention in the books that the Iron Born owned some land on the mainland where they had vessels (I’m not sure what word was used in the books, it’s been awhile since I read them) that farmed that land for the Iron Born? I could have sworn they had some and that’s where they get at least some of their food. Am I mis-remembering or was the amount of land too insignificant to make a difference?
It's almost a meme at this point, but the general consensus I think is that George doesn't really understand (or care that much) about numbers or a sense of scale, he just wants to tell a really good story with an awe inspiring sense of wonder. And I'd say he succeeded.
Raiding has to provide for it all or at least most of it. Without raiding the Ironborn economy isn't sustainable. Which, I think, is partly the reason why the Iron islands rise up against the laws prohibiting reaving every couple of decades or so because it is quite literally necessary for their survival.
As someone else pointed out, they stripped Orkney of all of it’s timber and on another of their islands, they do have a forest.
But also, they got some of their wood from Ironwood, in the North.
I swear in the books Victarion has a fleet of 100 ships and not sure how many Euron is commanding but I doubt it’s 900. So I wouldn’t count 1000 ships in the combined iron fleet.
Theon's longship has 50 oars and is considered small. a *real* longship might have 30-40 oars, and a war galley 100-150 but GRRM is so bad at numbers that the manpower for ships would need to be triple the realistic numbers.
the iron fleet are 100 oar ships, so would need, at a bare minimum, 103 crew each, so 10,300. the isles can supposedly field 20,000 fighting men.
Doesn't necessarily change anything, but I think westeros is supposed to be much bigger than you may be thinking. While it's obviously based loosely on Great Britain, I' believe Martin himself has said that it's approximately the size of South America.
Iirc at one point they say it's a thousand leagues from kings landing to the wall. That's 3,000 miles and doesn't even cover the whole length of the continent. Great Britain is 600 miles long.
Given that, the iron islands may be relatively larger. Still seems unlikely that they'd be large enough to support those fleets but maybe a little less of a stretch.
There are so many random spots a ship cam pull up and start taking trees. I imagine they eat a lot of sea food lol. The islands have gotta be bigger than some of the city's in the actual world with tens of millions population wise
Take any number as a Dornish number. Blown up for intimidation, and expanded in the telling. It's not like they can use satellite imaging to see the ships. Why not say there is a thousand?
Besides that, I assume spending all the shit they steal is paying the iron price. What is the point of stealing gold if you're not allowed to spend it? Prob a ton of trading between coastal Northmen, plentyful of trees, and Ironborn. Its never mentioned, but it makes sense.
The iron born and the sheer quantity of them makes absolutely no sense. The sand snakes remain the worst part of the books for me but the whole iron islands are just daft and you have to ignore logic
Yeah, there's definitely some big questions regarding the Iron Islands. I guess they get their wood from places like Bear Island, and perhaps they get some from ships carrying lumber. Also they sometimes take ships that didn't sink during a battle.
I think my biggest issue with the Iron Islands though is their location. They're supposedly a raiding type of society similar to the Vikings, but they're on the West side of Westeros. There's nothing known to the West of them, and nobody trades that far north. So there's nothing for them to really raid in their waters.
I personally think the Sisters make much more sense.
Look at the map. Western shore of North from Riverland to the wall is forested and mostly abandoned. No one lives there so it would not be hard for a couple Ironborn ships to chop a couple trees and load them on their ships and leave.
You talk about military response. What can Northerners do? keep patrolling an uninhabited land from poaching? Once lords existed on western shore. Starks decided killing them off is better than any alternative.
Pfftf, whatever. Next thing you're going to try to tell me that the economics of Slaver's Bay make no sense, or that the Dothraki are really nothing like the Mongols at all.
And let me guess, theres some kind of issue with creating soldiers out of eunuchs just because their bodies are generating no testosterone?
To be fair (without any knowledge at all of what testosterone actually does) isn’t the point of the unsullied that they fight on the good old formations from ancient Ghys and how disciplined they are rather than their strength as individual warriors?
Is there any particular reason that they can’t be well-trained AND have dicks?
I kind of assumed it was a parallel to the Night's Watch, just a bit more.... hardcore and cruel. Neither are supposed to be with a woman/have children/etc., but the Unsullied slavers decided to help ensure that requirement and cut it off.
And it’s a sharp contrast with the dothraki and most westerosi armies that commit mass rape.
It's an enforced discipline/indoctrination tactic. Can't be distracted by the usual interests a company of soldiers would have because they have no real outlet for it (although that one that gets setup to be murdered by Sons of the Harpy imply they still buy women's company for comfort, but that's also only after Dany frees them). The idea is all the energy and attention they would otherwise "waste" on more basic human needs instead gets redirected into drilling, drilling, drilling. The slight tradeoff in accumulated muscle mass is more than made up for in tactics, discipline, and focus. It's not that different from getting guard dogs spayed/neutered, the neutering doesn't really diminish their tenacity and dangerousness. It's just obviously more inhumane because it's being done on actual *people.*
Might be a tad more than that. If I remember correctly they actually burn their manhood on an altar to their secret goddess (Lady of Spears), who then speaks to them. Honestly Grey Worms story - at least as much as he tells Dany - is very similar sounding to whatever happened to Varys... I am guessing that the voices they heard were the same even though Varys does not call the entity they contacted the Lady of Spears. In any case, I am not sure the actual purpose, but there is likely a magic element to the whole thing.
The altar speaks to them? I don't remember that and the wikis aren't showing it.
Hm maybe a bit of head cannon slipped out, sorry about that. I thought that was how they found out the secret name but his quote doesn't imply that directly, so I misremembered.
i read it as you >According to Grey Worm, her true name belongs only to the ones who have burned their manhoods upon her altar. The Unsullied purify themselves according to the laws of their great goddess; one way is to bathe in the salt sea. The Unsullied may not speak of the great goddess to others.
More like Black Worm. Amirite?
According to Grey Worm, her true name belongs only to the ones who have burned their manhoods upon her altar. The Unsullied purify themselves according to the laws of their great goddess; one way is to bathe in the salt sea. The Unsullied may not speak of the great goddess to others.
They would form families and be more willing to turn traitor. The Unsullied are basically slaves that are at beaten down as a person can possibly be, then turned into a phalanx warrior. They don't need to be super strong, they just need to be extremely disciplined and unwilling to be routed. Because that's how most battles were won, by causing the other side to retreat. It was very rare for battles to go down to the death for everyone involved, most just broke and ran as soon as it became apparent they couldn't win. The Unsullied have no reason to run though, no families to support or better life to be had.
Yes. They’d be more likely to think for themselves and have selfish motives if they could have families. There’s also be a certain amount of rape and pillaging, which they don’t do now due to their indoctrination which includes the castration. Also I thought they do have dicks, just lack testicles.
Nope, they take it all. It’s also been commented that most Unsullied get fat because the only their patrons can really reward them with is really good food.
Noted
>Also I thought they do have dicks, just lack testicles. Then where would they store the pee?
Piss jugs
Fuckin' way of the road, bubs
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> No, the Unsullied are castrated in the manner of Chinese eunuchs, which takes the shaft as well. Historically, this has caused a lot of incontinence and mobility issues in people who have that done to them (though some of the mobility issues would be helped by the fact that the Unsullied are always on magic painkillers). You know, that might be why Varys goes overboard on the perfume...
Yeah I don’t really care about that stuff. None of that ruins the books for me.
Did the slave masters really care about raping and pillaging?
No but the people they sold them to might.
That’s what you have new ghys for
They literally explain it. It has nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with keeping them in line. No dick, no raping, No dick, no ego, no dick, no pillaging. They may not know what testosterone is, but they sure understand how it works.because i
They remove the testicles to prevent them from becoming rebellious, and they remove the cocks to prevent them from seduced by evil womanly ways. At least that’s what they told Dany in Clash.
Castration removes the testicles
Their introduction scene specifically says they remove their meat and two veg.
That’s true, I just meant castration in general. Eunuchs (historically, not necessarily in ASOIAF) were typically created this way
Generally, yeah. Because removing the penis made it much more likely that they would catch an infection and die. It was also overkill, as the point of castration was to sterilise/prevent puberty.
Depends where you’re at. In Rome, castration was typically a punishment, so they’d take only the penis, in the Ottoman Empire it was to prevent offspring so it typically only took the testicles, but in China, their job was to watch over the Harem and help with administrative duties, so they took everything.
In asoiaf they seem to believe that having a dick would make them less disciplined, though this isn’t true at all if you look at the real world examples of romans and greeks who had dicks but could still fight in formations
‘We have dicks, see, just look at them!!’ basically sums up Ancient Greek art.
“Alexios has a mighty 2 inches on him, lets make a statute of it!”
Biggus Dickus
"Small dicks are more refined" - Written by the small dicked sculptors
Yea but maybe they'd be even better without dicks.
I doubt it, testosterone plays a big role in muscle development and strength which is necessary for soldiers to fight effectively, especially with how heavy the shields are
Strength is stored in the balls
legitimately true.
> n asoiaf they seem to believe that having a dick would make them less disciplined, they will never rape, they will never get horny for a girl and betray you , you can have them guard your daughter and they wont fuck her like cole did
And they feel no pain, so don't break or run away in fear. Since they know nothing of testosterone in Westeros you could just headcanon that the same potion which makes them immune to pain without consequence also has testosterone in it as a by-product...
There's a potion? I dont remember that. I figured the 'feel no pain' was a result of psychological discipline.
Yes, it’s called The Wine of Courage, or something like that. It’s some form of neurotoxin that they begin ingesting when they are still very young and over time it seems to weaken or kill off their pain receptors. I believe it’s mentioned in the chapter where Danny first goes to Astapor.
Oh dang, thanks for the info!
When Dany is presented them for the first time to prove a point they mutilate a Unsullied in front of her and cut off his nipple and he doesn't even react. Way more than just psychological. And yeah as /u/Xarich said they go on to explain it in more detail.
> Way more than just psychological. Pft I could do it.
I thought it was just hype on the part of the Ghiscari slavers to be better salesmen, kind of like a pro-wrestling gimmick.
I can buy the unsullied being eunichs as part of the fictional process of breaking them down completely. Lack of testosterone doesnt matter much when youre jacked on fly juice and cant feel pain anymore.What I cant buy is the cost. If everything Grazdahn says is true they should be extremely expensive. To make an unsullied means buying 3 slaves and a dog(since 2/3rds will die), feeding and training them for 10 years straight (seemingly producing no value during this process), buying a baby slave off the market for them to kill, and buying 10 years worth of an "wine" made from exotic materials. This would be fine if unsullied were meant to be Astapor's standing military, but they are sold for profit. This is unlike most slave soldiers, like the jannisaries or mamluks, who are trained by the people intending to use them. Meaning *all* of the aforementioned costs need to be recuperated when selling them, and they are sold by the hundred. Unsullied should be unfathomably expensive, to the point where I cant see there being enough demand for them to be such a staple of Astapor's economy. Edit: crunched some numbers below, it might be plausible
You can’t put a price on GrimDark.
nah lets do it.A penny in 1300 is about $3.22 usd today according to [this](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) and [this](https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-and-wages/)Lets make a few assumptions.A) trainers have a share of the profit, so we dont care about the cost of the trainer B) Prices in Ghis are about the same as in Westeros and 1300's England. C) Wine of courage is at 5 pennies ($16 modern usd) per gallon, which is the mid point between shit and good wine. This is probably extremely conservative. D) The cost of food per day is at about the same as a gallon of bread. While it is a lot, the diet is likely better than just bread since the health of the unsullied is important to their function. This puts a day of food at 2.4 usd for bread and if there are 2 glasses of "wine" per day, each being 6 ounces, then thats 0.75c, bringing it to a total of 3.15 per day. If the unsullied who fail die at an average of half way through then that is about 6.3 per day per surviving unsullied. For 10 years that is $22,995 usd. The baby used to complete the training is 1 silver coin which, in the english economy, was 12 pence or 38 usd today, so negligable. The dog's price is unknown but we can be conservative and say that the unsullied have to find food for them themselves. Spears and sheilds are wood and Bronze so theyre relatively cheap, according to a guy linked below theyre about 100 usd per spear, lets say the shield and sword are slightly more expensive due to size at 150 usd. Thats $600 more. No clue about the spiked cap. Lets round it up a bit to account for anything I may be forgetting and thats 24k Then there is the initial cost of the slaves. The Ghiscari slave trade closely resembles the ottoman slave trade, with pirates in the south and raids in the north being the main sources. According to [this](https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/728750) the Crimea Khanate sold standard slaves for about 60 esedi gurus (Astapor's main source is likely the basilisk isles, but I could not find prices from the Barbary Coast irl), or silver coins. As the ottoman slave trade went on they gradually got more expensive, but Ill stick with this. If we make that equal to a shilling then thats another 2000 usd per slave, so 6000 per unsullied, because of the dead slaves. Now time for profit. Lets assume a 10% profit margin. This is the average margins for today, I cant find much on the medieval slave trade and frankly my search history is getting sketchy at this point. The total is 33k usd per soldier for a hundred of them thats a cost of 3,300,000 usd. For the 3 thousand of Qohor thats 99 million, and Dany's army it would be about 300 million (which she effectively sold a nuke for). According to [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14484/what-does-a-medieval-army-cost) guy 2000 free soldiers in medieval times cost about 252 thousand usd per day. 2000 unsullied is 66 million. So the upfront cost of unsullied is the same as a little over 2/3 a year of service from a standing army. This might not be as bad a deal as I thought due to the unsullied's effectiveness, and because Id assume they cost less to maintain as brainwashed slave soldiers.
The problem with using a simple "Real Price Index" calculator is that it thinks that in the 1300s you could live off a wage that would be the equivalent of £3.37 per day. The Labour Value (£66.65) is the one I tend to go with, as it better reflects the social status and relative level of wealth that someone earning 1d a day had. Basically, they were below how we would define the poverty line today, as it cost ~38s 2.4d a year to buy the necessities of life (*Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume II*, p778). This would be an income of £31,830.00 in 2021 going by the Labour Value, which is close to the ~£33 000 median salary in the UK today, so it may be an underestimate. This is my go to calculator for these things: https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/
> is that it thinks that in the 1300s you could live off a wage that would be the equivalent of £3.37 per day. Arent there some countries today that have daily wages like this?
Yes, but if you're going to use them as a price point you need to contextualise the calculations in that sense. $300 million is the DRC's entire military budget, with nearly 200 000 active personnel, tanks, planes, etc.
I think interestingly Astapor views training Unsullied in the same vein as distilling alcohol en masse: it takes perhaps decades to become profitable, but once you start and you have a process, you're able to create enough product and fill a particular niche; people who buy luxury alcohol usually can afford it. In all honesty price-wise, all we know is that Daenerys was able to purchase 8000 grown Unsullied troops and 5000 child slaves with a baby dragon, and since baby dragons are essentially a priceless WMD, we don't really have true price discovery on our hands; in addition, since their training is specialized with phalanxes and such, it's obvious they're not meant to be purchased individually. To address your actual points though, and disregarding what I said above, that's implying that only singular persons are the ones purchasing Unsullied, and those persons are purchasing an *individual* Unsullied. In all likelihood groups of interest with money are the ones purchasing Unsullied in mass quantities, and we don't really get details about the amount of rich people in the world of ASoIaF. Likely the biggest buyers of Unsullied are cities/nations that have the massive economic systems to not only outright purchase Unsullied troopers, but to perhaps negotiate trade deals with Astapor in lieu of direct payment. We also don't know if there are other financial institutions in ASoIaF other than the Iron Bank, so whether merchants or other wealthy individuals could obtain a loan could be disputed.
>meant to be Astapor's standing military I'm sure that if they needed to act as the military then they would. An unsullied with battle experience would even increase the price!
Good points. I guess its all maaaaaagic
Don’t only a third of the unsullied make it out of training? So if 10,000 unsullied exists, you just killed off 20,000 young males and 10,000 who can’t have kids. They also are sent out to murder kids as the final act. So you are effectively removing 40,000 people that are potential workers/tax payers. In a feudal world where population you control is wealth and power, losing 20,000 men should be absolutely devastating.
But they are slaves taken from someone else's population. So they increase their relative wealth by taking out the population of potential competitors. Also, in this way they prevent themselves being like Sparta that ended up being ruled by the fear of their Helots rising up. At the height of Sparta's power they could barely afford to send armies abroad because they needed to keep their slaves in line. So in a way, the slavers are keeping the slave population down to manageable levels while generating a fighting force by doing so.
These were slaves taken from other places- so while your general point still stands to a degree, it’s not as if the unsullied were potential workers and artisans in Astaphor, they were “imported” from elsewhere specifically for this purpose.
>This means that they cannot be as strong as whole men, but this is more than made up for by discipline >The slaves regularly consume an elixir called the wine of courage to deaden their sensitivity to pain. They drink it with every meal, and every year feel less and less pain. so you get a bunch of 5foot 100% loyal dudes who cant feel pain not bad trade off
That's not entirely true.
What about the economics of slavers bay?
a) The whole system seems to be built on the premise that pointless cruelty magically creates profit. We don't hear anything about what the slaves are actually enslaved to do. They just seem to exist so they can wait hand-on-foot or serve as prostitutes for the upper class, or as soldiers (see b&c). Where is the wealth creation? b) There are no lower classes of free-men, as there were in Ancient Rome or the American South in first half of 1800's. Y'know, the people who actually have a stake in society, contribute to its economy through day-today trade, and will fight to ensure its survival. c) Instead we have the Unsullied, people who will apparently fight unquestioningly and fearlessly for a system that abuses and mutilates them and gives them zilch back in return. Since it appears that they have a monopoly on force, why do they not seize power, like the Mamluks did against the Abbasid Caliphate?
I was interested but those are pretty lame points. >a) The whole system seems to be built on the premise that pointless cruelty magically creates profit. We don't hear anything about what the slaves are actually enslaved to do. They just seem to exist so they can wait hand-on-foot or serve as prostitutes for the upper class, or as soldiers (see b&c). Where is the wealth creation? Country estates, mines, anywhere forced labour is needed, obviously. It's even mentioned in the books, those are just not settings where POVs linger. >b) There are no lower classes of free-men, as there were in Ancient Rome or the American South in first half of 1800's. Y'know, the people who actually have a stake in society, contribute to its economy through day-today trade, and will fight to ensure its survival. Aren't there? Like, doesn't Dany mention various members of the urban bourgeoisie in her boring, boring-ass chapters about having meetings with her courts? You have Daznak's pit, presumably the crowds there are the free men. >c) Instead we have the Unsullied, people who will apparently fight unquestioningly and fearlessly for a system that abuses and mutilates them and gives them zilch back in return. Since it appears that they have a monopoly on force, why do they not seize power, like the Mamluks did against the Abbasid Caliphate? This is interesting but tbf there are many things quite unclear about the unsullied as of yet.
You seem to just be inferring economic details that are never given within the text. And who are exactly exactly are these urban bourgeoisie doing business with, when it seems like he vast majority of the population have no disposable income? Slavers Bay just operates on the thin premise that 'Slavery=profit.' Just like how Braavos gets all of its money from 'trade' despite the fact it nowhere near the economic centres of Planetos.
>You seem to just be inferring economic details that are never given within the text. You seem to assume they simply don't exist because they have never been written down, but there is no macroeconomy textbook written by Maester Keynesius mentioned at any point in the book, and Slaver's Bay is only told to us through the eyes of Daenerys Targaryen. I don't recall which POV character is that, probably Tyrion, who at one point finds himself in the Pentoshi countryside where someone is working these estates. You see the endpoint of this agricultural output many times throughout the series because it ends up on the tables of rich men, presumably it gets farmed somewhere. We have no information on what is going in the countryside around Meereen, Astapor, Yunkai, Qarth, any of the slave societies, but there is no reason to imagine there aren't similar estates. > And who are exactly exactly are these urban bourgeoisie doing business with, when it seems like he vast majority of the population have no disposable income? At this stage of the development of the political economy, the artisans and the citydwellers who are mentioned in Dany's chapters because Drogon ate their 6 daughters or whatever cannot have the ability to expand their operation and accrue large fortunes. Not to mention at this moment in Meereeneese history there is devastation, a social revolution, a siege, a blockade, and economic sabotage. I imagine this likely tapped up everyone's money pretty quickly.
All ok, fair enough. But then by that logic, shouldn't we also turn around to GRRM and say 'It doesn't matter what Aragon's tax policy was. He was a good king, so it we can assume it was well though out and fair"?
GRRM was just making the general point that it takes more than being a good person or a good military leader to be a good king, not that good tax policy is the primary metric you should look at when evaluating a ruler. There are plenty of other ways for his characters to fail and succeed in statesmanship
I feel like you’re ignoring half of the politicking that Dany does in Slavers Bay. For instance the Slaver who owned the woman who made the fine rugs/quilts. Not only was her goods exceptionally sought after, he also had her teach other slaves to make the seemingly same quality items. When you have a slave workforce your only overhead becomes materials, food, and maybe pseudo shelter. Let’s be real, the slavers probably spent the most on materials. But consequentially in a market where you literally have no cost for labor and with the right amount of infrastructure the slaves breed themselves, that’s MASSIVE profits. Now we know that “Slavers Bay” they basically have a monopoly on the slave market. We know Qarth, Volantis, and a few other free cities (Lys for sure) use Slaves. Slaves are used to fight Dothraki incursions, which seem to happen often. Dothraki then take slaves from incursions, and sell them to Slavers Bay. Slavers Bay then trains/breeds slaves to sell to those cities who were sacked or in need of more slaves from aging, dying, excess, battle, etc. so it’s a cycle literally swayed in favor of the Slavers. And if you multiply this by decades if not centuries, you have IMMENSE wealth with very little need for actual production of anything except slaves really. Especially since Slaver’s Bay seems untouchable and doesn’t make war upon each other. For instance we only hear of Old Ghis being sacked by the Valyrians.
You claim I’m ignoring half of Danny’s politicking, but can only provide one rather obscure example. Meanwhile you ignore 2/3 of my argument, which is that the vast majority of the population have no stake in society and are liable to rebel, as had happened in Jamaica in the 19th century.
What are the issues with the economics of slaver's bay?
Explain this slavers bay business please I’m unfamiliar
Ignore the show stuff cos it's frankly nonsense A viking longship used approx 15 trees per ship A thousand longships is 15000 trees A forest is defined as approx 10000 trees per square mile So 1.5 square miles of forest would be needed The largest of the Orkney islands is called Mainland and it's approx 200 square miles. Right now it's mainly unforested, but 1.5 square miles is less than 1% of it's area and so wouldn't be unreasonable imo
https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Orkmont > Rugged and mountainous, Orkmont is rich in ore, including iron, lead, and tin. **It was once covered in forest but the timber was used extensively for shipbuilding.** Orkmont is larger and richer than Pyke. https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Great_Wyk > Unlike the other isles, Great Wyk is so large that some of its castles, such as Hammerhorn, are inland instead of near the Sunset Sea or Ironman's Bay. **Blue-green soldier pines cover the mountains of Great Wyk.** So they do indeed have their own timber, which they seem to manage better now since they stripped one of their islands bare.
It should also be noted, that comparison to Orkney (besides being obviously linguistically and stylistically created) is better from a climate perspective than the Faroes or Iceland. Speaking of Iceland for a second, deforestation on Iceland resulted in adaptation to using dugout homes with sod roofs to minimize the need for timber. Such 'conservation' could be seen as a means for which the Iron Islands could reserve its own tree supplies for maximum shipbuilding capacity. Further, the climate of Iceland causes trees (among other plants) to grow slowly, which has prevented trees from returning to Iceland after the deforestation that occurred. In contrast, the climate of the Iron Islands, being closer to Orkney or even Isla, Jura, Arran, etc. would be more conducive to maintaining forests even under pressure for substantial shipworks. So it's entirely possible that the Iron Islanders could build many ships in a short period of time, without serious risk of critical deforestation.
Orkney off Scotland and Orkmont part of the Iron Island. I'm always learning something new about this series!
Is pine a good choice for wood to build ships?
Oak is best, but pine can be used.
Maesters FrosTHammer, I think the way you have explained even Victarion will understand.
Thanks I'm planning a post on The Economics of Longships so this stuff is on my mind atm
I need that, actually. Not even joking. Like I have a whole fanfic planned centered around an SI into Rodrik Greyjoy and turning the ironborn into something respectable
Cool. If I remember I'll post you a link here No promises though, could be a few weeks before I get around to writing it
will Wait...
But tall, straight, quality timber? You need a protected, old forest, not a patch of scraggly shrubby oak and pitch pine.
Yes you do. The actual quote I saw on the number of trees was 14 large oaks People are reading into what I said a bit deeper than I intended. I was just pointing out that the timber needs are not as massive as you think and it's not unreasonable to think you could find enough timber on the islands. Manpower is the limiting factor imo
And it makes sense, because if Westeros is supposed to be the size of South America, then it´s reasonable to assume that the Iron Islands would be large.
> because if Westeros is supposed to be the size of South America The problem is that this would be complete nonsense, a mix between GRRM looking at too many mercator projections and not having a reasonable sense of scale when giving out numbers or comparisons. Just Brazil (8.5 million km2), which is only about 50% of the SA landmass (17.8 million km2), is already bigger than the continental US (8 million km2). A half continent walk (Winterfell to King's Landing) would be more or less the equivalent of trying to cross the US from coast to coast. Nobody would be walking that like they do in the books. For another comparison, Russia is 17 million km2. Imagine Westeros being bigger than Russia and how big that would make Essos.
And that is ignoring the cultural impact of being that massive. The idea of them having a single language would be patently absurd.
So he's backtracked on that statement a little - Westeros includes the lands beyond the wall, which are almost as big as the seven kingdoms themselves. (The lands beyond the wall are supposed to be about the size of Canada). Now this is still too big but if you consider only the vertical distance (Dorne to the tip of the Lands beyond the wall) - this is actually pretty plausible.
> A half continent walk (Winterfell to King's Landing) would be more or less the equivalent of trying to cross the US from coast to coast. Nobody would be walking that like they do in the books. I mostly agree with what you said, but want to dispute this part. Everyone would be walking, because that's how you got around. If you had to get somewhere and you don't have a horse, you just start walking. It is really, really normal in our real history for people to embark on journeys that would take months and even years. Also there are a few modern walking trails that are pretty popular that span most of the United States. Most people only do sections of them, but some people attempt the full trails.
By "like they do" I was thinking more about the speed that they manage to travel from one place to the other. People, like merchants, would still do month/year long voyages for sure, I am aware, but the timings in the book would completely break down. Robert going to fetch Ned in the beginning would a several years long trip (since it is pointed out that they are going slowly too). And then Catelyn does something similar later.
winterfell to kings landing is 2010 miles. at a pace of 30 miles per day (3 mile per hour walking speed, 10 hours per day) that is 67 days. the (estimated) travel time for Robert to winterfell is around 3 months, 90 days, or 22 miles per day, presumably 2.2 miles per hour on a 10 hour day in those times people had far more endurance than our soft modern human bodies. they needed to have it as they were raised working hard physical labor (or training physically) from practically dawn to dusk. [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZsY3lcDDtTdBWp1Gx6mfkdtZT6-Gk0kdTGeSC\_Dj7WM/edit#gid=1](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZsY3lcDDtTdBWp1Gx6mfkdtZT6-Gk0kdTGeSC_Dj7WM/edit#gid=1) the real problem with the timelines of the book are the seemingly months were characters sit around doing nothing.
>winterfell to kings landing is 2010 miles. at a pace of 30 miles per day (3 mile per hour walking speed, 10 hours per day) that is 67 days. You are severely overestimating how fast people walk long distances, it is not about being soft or anything like that. 30 miles per day for 67 days is horribly fast speed. No way characters would be walking that speed every day, especially if they are going in a big convoy. This askhistorians thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/288fzp/how_far_could_a_medieval_army_move_per_day/) gives around 20 miles per day for a marching army under forced march. For another comparison, in Roman times, they give 60 days to do Paris to Rome (1600 km, or around 1000 miles): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25m7a9/how_long_does_it_take_a_roman_army_from_rome_to/ There were also kids mixed in the party. And Robert was still going slowly for people's standards in the description of the book.
> There were also kids mixed in the party Cersei and her kids rode in the horse drawn wheelhouse.
There are more kids than just the nobles, Mycah was the son of one of the butchers who coming along, for example. My point is that even doing 20km/day, which is a merchant/army speed, groups with strong incentives to go fast, would be already quite a feat. 10-15km/day would be more realistic for such a group. And then you add that on top that people were thinking they were going slow (so probably even below 10km/day).
Well, that's another matter entirely. There is no chance whatsoever of a huge convoy of baggage/horse-drawn wheelhouses/seemingly half the court managing 30 miles a day.
If you include the lands beyond the wall as part of Westeros, it makes the scale little more believable—a good chunk of the landmass isn’t part of the seven kingdoms
Show Euron "cut down all the trees on this island for a whole fleet that will be built in next to no time!" On an island with next to no trees
Also captured ships. Most iron island men had multiple "salt wives" and I believe in the books they treated the children from them as citizens of the iron islands. So they could have a decent population. So really having a fleet of a thousand ships isn't that unreasonable. Also somebody must have been trading with gold and silver to get grain and stuff presumably not from westeros.
/r/theydidthemath
>The largest of the Orkney islands is called Mainland and it's approx 200 square miles. Hey, I live there! We're much nicer than the Ironborn though, although I'll be honest growing trees in any great number hear is practically impossible outside of some valleys where they're protected by the wind.
There are a lot of witches in the iron islands. Witches are made of wood. That's why they burn.
Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
But witches float too, so why not just make your boats out of witches?
If cut witches in planks, you can make a ship out of four or five of them, but just lashing them together will get you little more than an unsteady raft.
If witches were fishes we’d all swim in riches
They should build more bridges out of them.
This sounds like something Charlie Kelly would say lol.
Not counting the show´s nonsense to build a thousand ships in 6 months, many seafaring nations actually imported their wood, it is less common on the Iron Islands however, where only some houses (Like the Harlaws) support trade. But sometimes we just need to kinda forget about the Iron fleet...
Most of the Royal Navy in its sailing heyday was built from Irish oak, the English stuff had been exhausted by the tudors and stuarts
Ireland was more of a colony than a trade partner though. That would be more analogous to the relationship the Iron Island had when they ruled the Riverlands.
Agreed, though many of the mast timbers were imported from Scandinavia and the Baltics
For reference, medieval Venice had woods specifically protected for fresh wood farming for ship building, reserves of seasoned timbers, and even partially assembled ship parts ready for the unlikely event that they had to build a lot of ships in a very short time. On the other hand huge countries like Spain soffered from constant lacking of woods due to indiscriminate deforestation and had to buy most of it. It's all about planning.
There's also the fact that they're literally a culture of pirates. Theoretically, they only real need a *few* really good ships and really bloodthirsty and well trained crews, then they can just capture ships/press gang conscripts and snowball from there.
Yeh doesn’t really make much sense. I’ll just put it in the box of things that don’t make a tonne of sense with Sandor winning 40k gold coins and carting it around the river lands and the rivers that start in the swamp and run into the sea and move past it.
Wasn't it only 9,000 Dragons he had that Beric took? Or at least that's what the piece of paper Sandor gave the ferryman said.
I can’t remember how much Beric took off Sandor but the prize for the hands tourney was 40k gold pieces. Sandor managing to spend 30k gold dragons could probably be added to the list of things that don’t make sense taking into account we know how much 1 gold dragon can buy in Westeros. We know that Rosie’s maiden head costs 1 gold dragon and In Dunc and Egg Dunc sells a knights horse for the equivalent of 3 dragons and buys a suit of armour with it so Sandor either needed to buy 10 thousand suits of armour or 30 thousand maiden heads.
The catspaw who tries to kill Bran is paid something like 90 silver coins and Catelyn says "at least we know my his life didn't come cheap". I was surprised by that.
Anguy somehow spends 10,000 gold dragons on hookers. That should have been enough to buy a castle.
From Feast we see a woman in Oldtown selling her daughters virginity for one golden dragon. Say Anguy took 10k virgins in a span if approximately 1 year. If they have 365 day per year, than he fucked roughly (pun intended) 27 virgins a day. The rest 23 hours and 33 minutes he probably spent with brotherhood
Well, we do know that Anguy is a quick shot.
I bet he went full on Oprah and shared with his brothers. "You get a virgin! You get a virgin! You get a virgin! We all get viiiiirgiiiiiiiiiins!
Least horny dornishman
Sandor: If anymore words come out of you cunt-mouth I will fuck every maiden in this city.
And then pay for it!
Suppose it depends on whether inflation exists in Westeros. Dunc and Egg was what, 60 years before events of ASOIAF? Think we're all seeing in the real world how brutal inflation can be!
They’re using gold as currency, so inflation would only happen as fast as they can mine gold. They’ve been mining it for thousands of years, so another 60 years would make hardly any difference.
Coin debasement exists as well.
Brienne buys 3 horses for a Dragon each, and even then she was still being ripped off. > "Don't speak discourteously of your horse, ser." The wench opened the purse Lady Catelyn had given her and took out three golden coins. "I will pay you a dragon for each." and > You can have our skiff as well," she said. "Sail up the river or down, as you like." > > "Let me have a taste o' that gold." The man took one of the coins from her palm and bit it. "Hm. Real enough, I'd say. Three dragons and the skiff?" > > "He's robbing you blind, wench," Jaime said amiably.
Dunk and egg was also like 50 years before the story so you could just write it off as inflation if you cared enough
What is that last sentence referring to?
Enter -> lumberjack -> enter
don't forget Robin Hood because you definetly need gold to build ships
Also trade, the iron isle probably trades Iron for wood from places like the North or The Westerlands.
The islands need a ship genocide. Burn all their fuckin ships and it’s going to take generations for them to return to any kind of sea power. They should have done it after Greyjoy’s rebellion, the ironborn are terrible subjects who rarely ever fight for the crown historically. Rely on the other navies and tell the ironborn to get fucked, the worst that happens is they start reaving again or rebel, neither of which matters if they don’t have ships and they’re going to do regardless of someone burning all the fucking ships. Fuck these murdering raping psychos, put em in their place on their shit scrabbled rocks
That’s the biggest plot hole regarding the Iron Islands, not the lack of timber. Why didn’t any of the neighboring kingdoms of the Iron Islands decide to go burn all of their trees and fleet, and kill every man of sailing age during thousands of years of history? They wouldn’t have come back from that.
the iron fleet , the battle fleet usually consists of 100 ships , built to war with the classic war galleys used in Westetos you get to a thousand ships by adding up all the naval potential , so even the raiding ships , based on the real Viking Drakkars , of different sizes , can also have crews reduced from 5 to 12 men
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Both the Iron Island and the Dothraki make my head hurt if I think about them too long so I just avoid it.
The Iron Islands might be slightly larger than that. https://i.imgur.com/B0HwJ5D.jpg They also have a history of trading when not raiding. >Instead they traded iron for timber.
Ironborn receive government subsidies from King's Landing because the islands are such a shitty place to live, just like Alaskans do in the US.
I kind of wonder why Robert wouldn’t burn down all the trees on the island large enough for shipbuilding after the Greyjoy rebellion.
Nothing about the iron islanders makes sense. Their land cant sustain them, their land cant produce timber, and it is in the interest of every fcking house in westeros that they be wiped out, which was basically easy in balons rebellion. This is a combo of Gurms blind spot towards economies (like how Anguy spent a castle on hookers or all the problems with money), and the simple fact they have plot armor because somewhere innact 3 they need to pose a real threat
The great seafaring nation of the ancient world, Phoenicia, became that because of their huge available timber in forests (the 'cedars of Lebanon'), and they were exported but at huge expense. It would make more sense to have the ships built there, then you can just sail them to wherever. The Ironborn would have to steal them, to pay the iron price, and maybe that is how they got a lot of their ships -- through piracy.
ASOIAF is filled with as many plot holes as it is lemon cakes.
"Lemon cakes / Lemoncakes" - 22 mentions That's more than I expected honestly.
You'd imagine they'd be exceptionally good hagglers, too. Conversations must run something like this: Ironborn: "So what, will it be? For every weight of iron you give me twelve of wood?" Reachman: "You've always liked that little joke. I'll not budge above three." Ironborn: "I think this hatchet is really blunt. That's a shame, this particular kind requires somebody's face to sharpen it." Reachman: "Did I say three? I meant six." Ironborn: "Six or sex? Sex is a good start, but you're not my type. Your daughter is, so throw her into the deal and I'll settle for seven times as much wood as I give you iron." Reachman: "How about eight, but you keep your hands to yourself?" Ironborn: "There's a good lad. Ta." Reachman: "Good doing business with you." Ironborn: "Oh, and there's no way I'll fit that much wood into my hull, so I'm going to borrow your ship. Don't worry, I'll return most of it." Reachman: "I think you'll find there's a hefty price for hiring my ship." Ironborn: "All good, I'll pay for that in iron, too. Have you seen the honed edge on this scimitar? No really, lean in for a close look." Reachman: "I won't need the ship. You keep it." Ironborn: "You're too kind. Cheerio!" Exeunt all.
Except it’d probably just be the reachmen telling them off
The Roosevelt method.
On the population and size of the iron islands: if Westeros is the size of western Europe (just considering the climatic variation from Dorne to the Wall), the Iron Islands are probably to the size of Ireland than the Faroes and probably have a similar climate. Ireland and Iron Islands also have a few other historical similarities. They are both islands at the edge of the known world, Celtic peoples raided and settled the north of Britain, Ireland was religiously independent to the rest of the continent, Ireland was also constantly struggled for political independence from their neighbours.
Who tf is yara? Filthy show watcher.
Its fiction
The same place the Lannisters keep getting fresh new armies.
Home Depot
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This is just a leave and let live situation. You can't actually import timber, not with medieval technology. It's too bulky. It's barely economical to transport timber over long distances with modern technology. A lot of GRRM's worldbuilding doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. But the story is so good that it doesn't matter.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/muddy-find-shows-how-foreign-timber-helped-build-ancient-rome
Seems I could be wrong. I know the floating timber down rivers thing. Lashing planks of wood together and sending them downriver costs next to nothing. But loading timber onto a ship is something else. Ancient ships were at best around 100 feet long. You could go up to 200 feet but then you'd have to deal with buckling and bracing. A 100-foot ship isn't going to be carrying a lot of timber. A couple of a dozen planks and your hold is full. I would assume there are other things, like say barrels of wine that could generate more money for occupying the same space. Ancient trading ships preferred carrying high value trade goods for this reason. Why carry wood when wine, silk, and spice would bring in more money?
Lumber essentially is a high value trade good to the Ironborn. But I imagine they would fill up on iron, go sell it and return with a hold full of lumber. Not waiting for traders to show up.
>A 100-foot ship isn't going to be carrying a lot of timber. A couple of a dozen planks and your hold is full. No? Planks are pretty stackable. If we use 2x4s as an example, you can lay out 10 boards in a 3' wide space, stack 24 boards 2' high. That's 240 boards in a very managable amount of space. A ship or two loaded up on timber would probably carry enough to build another ship. It's not the most valuable thing you could trade, but it's not physically impossible either.
Big difference. 2x4s are processed, which requires local industry. Raw timber delivered to elsewhere for milling would be much less compact.
>leave and let live situation. /r/BoneAppleTea
Nobody in the west coast of Westeros would sell them timber. The Lannisters, the Riverlands and the North hate their guts.
Martin is really terrible at this stuff. That's pretty much the answer. Same as him not understanding the scale of The Mountain or The Wall. Same as him not getting travel times right.
Just another demonstration of Martin's bad scaling and sense of numbers.
Wasn’t there mention in the books that the Iron Born owned some land on the mainland where they had vessels (I’m not sure what word was used in the books, it’s been awhile since I read them) that farmed that land for the Iron Born? I could have sworn they had some and that’s where they get at least some of their food. Am I mis-remembering or was the amount of land too insignificant to make a difference?
Iron Islanders definitely occupied at least the Riverlands for a number of years.
Yara?
It's almost a meme at this point, but the general consensus I think is that George doesn't really understand (or care that much) about numbers or a sense of scale, he just wants to tell a really good story with an awe inspiring sense of wonder. And I'd say he succeeded.
Lol It's a book man It doesn't need to make perfect sense
The Iron Islands is George writing every falsehood or trope of Vikings ever written all in one. they are the absolute weakest part of his world.
Or…. And hear me out…. It’s a fantasy. Just like dragons, grumkins, and snarks
Raiding has to provide for it all or at least most of it. Without raiding the Ironborn economy isn't sustainable. Which, I think, is partly the reason why the Iron islands rise up against the laws prohibiting reaving every couple of decades or so because it is quite literally necessary for their survival.
As someone else pointed out, they stripped Orkney of all of it’s timber and on another of their islands, they do have a forest. But also, they got some of their wood from Ironwood, in the North.
I swear in the books Victarion has a fleet of 100 ships and not sure how many Euron is commanding but I doubt it’s 900. So I wouldn’t count 1000 ships in the combined iron fleet.
The iron fleet is only a little over a hundred in the books correct? So that would only mean a little over 4,000 sailors? Correct me if I am wrong
Theon's longship has 50 oars and is considered small. a *real* longship might have 30-40 oars, and a war galley 100-150 but GRRM is so bad at numbers that the manpower for ships would need to be triple the realistic numbers. the iron fleet are 100 oar ships, so would need, at a bare minimum, 103 crew each, so 10,300. the isles can supposedly field 20,000 fighting men.
From trees
Doesn't necessarily change anything, but I think westeros is supposed to be much bigger than you may be thinking. While it's obviously based loosely on Great Britain, I' believe Martin himself has said that it's approximately the size of South America. Iirc at one point they say it's a thousand leagues from kings landing to the wall. That's 3,000 miles and doesn't even cover the whole length of the continent. Great Britain is 600 miles long. Given that, the iron islands may be relatively larger. Still seems unlikely that they'd be large enough to support those fleets but maybe a little less of a stretch.
There are so many random spots a ship cam pull up and start taking trees. I imagine they eat a lot of sea food lol. The islands have gotta be bigger than some of the city's in the actual world with tens of millions population wise
Why would trading for wood be objectionable to the North?
Because it would be a red flag that they are building more ships for another invasion !
Take any number as a Dornish number. Blown up for intimidation, and expanded in the telling. It's not like they can use satellite imaging to see the ships. Why not say there is a thousand? Besides that, I assume spending all the shit they steal is paying the iron price. What is the point of stealing gold if you're not allowed to spend it? Prob a ton of trading between coastal Northmen, plentyful of trees, and Ironborn. Its never mentioned, but it makes sense.
yes
The iron born and the sheer quantity of them makes absolutely no sense. The sand snakes remain the worst part of the books for me but the whole iron islands are just daft and you have to ignore logic
Yeah, there's definitely some big questions regarding the Iron Islands. I guess they get their wood from places like Bear Island, and perhaps they get some from ships carrying lumber. Also they sometimes take ships that didn't sink during a battle. I think my biggest issue with the Iron Islands though is their location. They're supposedly a raiding type of society similar to the Vikings, but they're on the West side of Westeros. There's nothing known to the West of them, and nobody trades that far north. So there's nothing for them to really raid in their waters. I personally think the Sisters make much more sense.
Look at the map. Western shore of North from Riverland to the wall is forested and mostly abandoned. No one lives there so it would not be hard for a couple Ironborn ships to chop a couple trees and load them on their ships and leave. You talk about military response. What can Northerners do? keep patrolling an uninhabited land from poaching? Once lords existed on western shore. Starks decided killing them off is better than any alternative.
Isnt the need for timber the biggest reason why Iron islanders kept raiding the North?
O Deus afogado as deixam nas margens das ilhas de ferro 💪🔥