by Ed West
Copyright © 2019 by Ed West
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3564-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3565-1
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. THE REALM
ENGLAND AND THE WORLD IN 1314
2. THE IRON KING
FRANCE, THE REACH, AND THE CURSE OF THE TEMPLARS
3. THE LION OF ENGLAND
THE REAL TYWIN LANNISTER
4. THE FIRST MEN
ANCIENT BRITAIN AND WESTEROS
5. “YOU’RE NO SON OF MINE”
SCOTLAND AND THE SHE-WOLF
6. “WE BOW DOWN BEFORE NO MAN”
GREECE, SPARTA, AND THE REAL UNSULLIED
7. WALLS OF ICE AND BRICK
ROMAN INSPIRATIONS
8. BEYOND THE WALL
SCOTTISH HISTORY IN GAME OF THRONES
9. THE OLD GODS AND THE NEW
RELIGION, MAGIC, AND MONSTERS IN MARTIN’S WORLD AND OURS
10. WINTER IS COMING
THE GREAT FAMINE
11. THE SEVEN
CHURCH AND SEPT
12. DORNISH SPAIN
MOORISH SPAIN AND DORNE
13. SILK RIBBONS TIED ROUND THE SWORD
SELLSWORDS, RAPERS, AND THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR
14. THE SEVEN KINGDOMS
THE ANDALS AND THE ANGLES
15. THE DANCE OF DEATH
GREYSCALE, THE BLACK DEATH, AND LEPROSY
16. “CATTLE DIE, KINDRED DIE, WE OURSELVES SHALL DIE.”
VIKING INFLUENCES ON GAME OF THRONES
17. THE BRETHREN OF THE CROSS
THE SEPT, THE CHURCH, SPARROWS, FLAGELLANTS
18. THE DROWNED TOWN
VENICE AND BRAAVOS
19. THE SMALL FOLK
THE JACQUERIE AND THE PEASANTS REVOLT
20. WILDFIRE
CONSTANTINOPLE, THE GREATEST CITY THAT WAS AND WILL BE
21. THE MAD KING
MADNESS AND FIRE
22. FIRE AND BLOOD
CONQUERORS, CASTLES, BASTARDS, AND DWARVES
23. THE DEATH OF KINGS
THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD II
24. A SONG OF HEROIC DEEDS
TOURNAMENTS AND CHIVALRY
25. THE CURSE OF THE KINGSLAYER
THE HOUSE OF PERCY
26. “I HAVE OTHER SONS”
HOW ENGLAND’S FORGOTTEN CIVIL WAR INSPIRED GAME OF THRONES
27. A GOLDEN CROWN
HENRY V, FALSTAFF, AND ROBERT BARATHEON
28. “I AM A KNIGHT, I SHALL DIE A KNIGHT”
WILLIAM MARSHAL, THE SWORD OF THE MORNING
29. THE WITCH
JOAN OF ARC—THE WOMAN WHO STEPPED INTO THE FIRE
30. THE SWORD IN THE DARKNESS
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS AND THE NIGHT’S WATCH
31. A MARRIAGE OF FIRE AND MILK
HENRY VI AND MARGARET OF ANJOU
32. A CLASH OF STEEL
JUSTICE AND VENGEANCE
33. THE STALLION WHO MOUNTS THE WORLD
DOTHRAKI AND MONGOLS
34. THE SMELL OF BLOOD AND ROSES
YORK AND SOMERSET
35. THE ROCK THAT BESTRIDES THE CONTINENTS
THE RISE OF THE TURKS
36. THE KINGS IN THE NORTH
THE PERCYS AND THE NEVILLES
37. THE SONS OF THE FIRST MEN
THE TUDORS
38. THE BLACK DINNER
THE REAL RED WEDDING
39. THE YOUNG WOLF
YORK AND LANCASTER AT THE BRIDGE OF BODIES
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
INTRODUCTION
A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Learning of his father’s death, the adolescent—dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the North—vows to avenge him in combat. Despite his youth, he has already won several battles and commands the loyalty of many of the leading families of the realm; he is supported in this war by his mother, who has spirited away her two younger sons to safety far from the rampaging armies of their father’s enemies. Against them is the queen, “passionate and proud and strong-willed”1 and with more of the masculine virtues of the time than most men. She too is battling for the inheritance of her young son, not yet fully grown but already a sadist who takes delight in watching executions.
This tale will sound familiar to fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and its HBO television adaptation Game of Thrones, but this is not the story of Westeros; rather of the real-life realm of England in 1461. On March 29 of that year, the deadliest battle ever fought on British soil took place on a spot now called Bloody Meadow in Yorkshire, deep within what was once the old kingdom of the north. Lasting into the night, despite a thick blizzard, the Battle of Towton was marked by extreme brutality, and by the end of the fighting some twenty-eight thousand men lay dead, many executed after the battle’s end.2 It was the climax to six years of violence and would decide which family ruled the kingdom.
On one side was an army led by Edward, Earl of March—the name was pronounced “Eddard” at the time3—the eighteen-year-old heir to the House of York, who had claimed the throne that year following the beheading of his father, Richard of York. Facing him were the forces of the House of Lancaster, fighting in the name of the queen, Margaret of Anjou, and her husband, the mad King Henry VI, whose weak mind had been the cause of York’s rebellion.
Edward had recently won a victory at Mortimer’s Cross, close to the Welsh border, weeks after his father and brother Edmund were slain at Wakefield. Richard of York, a descendant of the great warrior king Edward III through both his mother and father, had emerged in the 1450s as the most powerful man in the kingdom, but he would not win the throne. Instead his head was stuck on a pole in the city of York with a paper crown placed on top in mockery of his ambitions; his son Edward had sworn vengeance and would get it. Still barely a grown man, he went on to win a series of battles before his success was imperiled by his choice of bride.
By the time the conflict between the Houses of York and Lancaster had burned itself out, the bones of three or even four generations of some families would be scattered across the battlefields of England, the Plantagenet line destroyed in the fury of the Cousin’s War. During this period, 25 percent of male aristocrats in the kingdom died violently, and some houses were entirely wiped out in a cycle of vengeance that came to break all the laws of warfare.4
The story would fascinate future generations, retold in the plays of William Shakespeare and later by the nineteenth-century novelist Walter Scott, who popularized the name “the War of the Roses” in reference to the emblems of the two families. It was this dynastic conflict that would provide
much of the historical inspiration for George R.R. Martin when he wrote his fantasy series. Martin, a keen fan of popular history, has spoken on occasions about the people and periods that he drew on. A Song of Ice and Fire is set in “the Realm,” or Seven Kingdoms, a country comprising the southern half of the island of Westeros. These books tell the story of the struggle to win the Iron Throne by a number of competing families: among them are the Lannisters, the richest clan in the Realm, who have gained control of the capital, King’s Landing, in the southeast of the island; the Starks, who are the leading family of the old northern kingdom; and the Baratheons, who trace their roots to an ancestor who helped a great conqueror several generations earlier. It is a brutal and tragic world, one where the only options for those playing the game of thrones are victory or death.
As well as being an epic fantasy in its own right, Game of Thrones is also a fantastic (in both senses of the word) retelling of the story of the real Realm—England. It was inspired, in the author’s own words, not just by “The Wars of the Roses . . . but also the Hundred Years War, the Crusades, the Norman Conquest,”5 and along the way the story takes in a sweep of European and Near Eastern history, from the ancient worlds of Egypt, Rome, and Greece, through to the flowering of medieval civilization and beyond to the Renaissance and the birth of the early modern world. And the struggle for the throne of England, from the Saxon invasion in the fifth century to the downfall of the House of York a millennium later, is as fascinating as any fiction on earth.
George R.R. Martin first laid out the concept for his novel A Game of Thrones in a letter to his agent in 1993. He called it “a cycle of plot, counterplot, ambition, murder and revenge, with the iron throne of the Seven Kingdoms as the ultimate prize.”6 Westeros was to be, in the words of one historian, “a loose tribute to the British Isles at some unfixed point in the Middle Ages, where the mood of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy is mashed together with the merciless family feuding that engulfed England during the [fifteenth]-century War of the Roses,” a mixture of fantasy and history that delighted in squalor “torture, prostitution, incest, sodomy and rape.”7
Or as novelist John Lanchester wrote of the series: “The Wars of the Roses, in this reimagining, are—as they surely were in real life—a blood-soaked, treacherous, unstable world, saturated in political rivalries, in which nobody is safe . . . It’s not a world any sane person would want to live in, not for a moment.”8 The show is also utterly amoral. There is no right or wrong. And that is the attraction.
History is the underlying inspiration, but Game of Thrones is also influenced by the genre of medieval heroism that originated with the tales of King Arthur and Chrétien de Troyes, epic stories from the birth of medieval Europe that informed how people thought of the world. But unconstrained by a need for accuracy, fantasy allows the author and reader far greater freedom, so what we have is an “epic retelling of the War of the Roses without the burden of history.”9 Any historical comparison can only go so far, and no character exactly matches a real historical figure, and yet most of what takes place in Westeros can be found in a specific period of European history that historians refer to as the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, when England and France were ruined by war, famine, plague, and social and religious upheaval. It is this period, 1315 to 1461, that this book will mostly cover, telling the backstory of European history as the narrative progresses.
The medieval realm was a delicate political body that depended on a strong king who could unite the aristocracy, but tragically, and within half a century, England was ruled by two monarchs who were mentally unbalanced; firstly, Richard II, a boy-king whose paranoia and sense of personal majesty bordered on the pathological, and later the feeble minded, and possibly schizophrenic, Henry VI.
Likewise, Game of Thrones begins in the aftermath of a rebellion against a violent and paranoid monarch who has alienated the great magnates of the land. In Westeros, the rebel lords overthrow the mad king Aerys II Targaryen, a revolt led by Robert Baratheon, who in turn takes the crown and marries Cersei Lannister, a beautiful, cunning, and ruthless individual from the country’s leading house. Like many powerful women of the late medieval period, she is accused of being unfaithful, although in this case the allegation is true; her twin brother, Jaime, is the real father of her three children, including the eldest, Joffrey, a monster in the making.
The usurper Robert Baratheon is the eldest of three brothers; of his siblings one is cold and calculating, the other jovial but facile; and with Robert gorging himself to an early grave, the two maneuver for power. Simmering conflict is emerging between the Lannisters and the Starks, the latter descendants of the old rulers of the North and the most powerful family in that kingdom. Eddard Stark had been Robert Baratheon’s childhood friend, his comrade-at-arms and then his Hand, charged with administering the Realm on behalf of the monarch. Drunk and bloated, King Robert is killed in a hunting accident before his fortieth birthday, mauled to death by a boar; it is this event, not entirely an accident, that triggers a fresh conflict, with the succession of Joffrey opposed by his uncles, the claimants Stannis and Renly Baratheon.
Ned Stark, having learned the truth of Joffrey’s parentage, gives his support to Stannis, only to be arrested by Cersei Lannister and then executed on Joffrey’s orders. This is despite the new king being betrothed to Sansa Stark, Ned’s daughter. After Stark’s death, his son Robb declares himself the King of the North, as his ancestors were before they bent the knee, while Ned’s bastard son Jon Snow has joined the Night’s Watch, the body of men sworn to guard the wall that protects the Seven Kingdoms from the wildings to the north.10
Within King’s Landing various figures jostle for power: Varys, a eunuch nicknamed “the Spider” because of his network of spies; Petyr Baelish, a moneylender and brothel-keeper who has risen to the council from a relatively lowly station; Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf brother of Jaime and Cersei; and their father Tywin Lannister, an imposing and brutal aristocrat warrior whose sole motivation is to further the interests of his house, whatever the costs. The War of the Five Kings begins, pitting the Lannisters, with their powerbase in the south, against the pre-eminet family in the north, the Starks.
And so it was in real life—sort of. Edward IV, as the Earl of March became, was in Martin’s words an inspiration both for Robert Baratheon and Robb Stark. Like the Starks, March was descended from the old ruling family of the most northerly of Anglo-Saxon England’s seven kingdoms, Northumbria, a distinctive, independent land, tougher and poorer than the south, before the realm was united in the tenth century. Like Robb, he never lost a battle during his successful adolescent military career; like Robb, too, he faced a formidable and fearsome queen whose machinations had already cost his father his head.
This conflict marked, in British history, the end of the medieval period and the start of a new era. An era of new weapons capable of killing on an awesome scale, a technology that arrived from the east and was far more terrifying than dragons: gunpowder. It was a dangerous new world, of increasing instability around the throne and of worsening violence in politics, for as one historian put it, “a deposed monarch has nowhere to fall but into the grave.”11 Or as Cersei tells Ned Stark: “This is the game of thrones, you win or you die.”12
This great crisis starts in the year when the long winter came.
1
THE REALM
Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.
—RODERICK HARLAW
Alnwick Castle was the first line of defence if ever the wild men from beyond the wall poured over the border. A forbidding fortress built on a slope and controlling the only passable road on the English side of the Cheviot Hils, it was built to hold the North. The only way in to the citadel was via the barbican, the intimidating gateway overlooked by a tower, and through this narrow passage, with thick wooden doors at either end, the daily traffic of horses and men would bring supplies to the castle. When the invaders came to rape and pillage the villages of th
e North, as they had done for centuries, men and women would swarm into the castle seeking the protection of their lord.
Built in the eleventh century, Alnwick is deep inside Northumberland, England’s most northerly county, and just twenty miles from the border with Scotland, inside a frontier country that had become increasingly lined with fortresses. The castle had been enhanced over the years with a solid portcullis gate protecting the entrance, with heavily-defended battlements, a twenty-one-foot drop below the drawbridge and walls seven feet thick, as well as a moat. Looking down at the surrounding area was an octagonal tower decorated with thirteen stone shields representing the families who had married into the House of Percy down the generations.
If the outer door of the barbican was ever penetrated by invaders, it still presented a dauting prospect, overlooked by four high towers from which loyal northern men could fire at the enemy below—using arrows or missiles, boiling water or fat. Inside the barbican, an attacker would be surrounded by high, thick walls and arrows firing down at them from all sides. Below them they would feel the mesh that led to the dungeons.1 If the barbican fell, the castle still had two courtyards, or baileys, from which last gasp fighting could be carried out. The fortress of House Percy had been built to keep them in the North.
Just as in Westeros the King’s Road heads from King’s Landing to Winterfell and to beyond the wall, so in real life the Great North Road led all the way from London to Edinburgh—Castle Rock, as its fortress was called—passing by the stronghold of Alnwick. Whoever controlled Alnwick therefore controlled the main route from Scotland to the South, and by the catastrophic year of 1314 this was the House of Percy. From Alnwick, the Percys dominated the frontier with the Scots beyond the great wall once built by the Romans (although in reality Alnwick, like a tiny portion of England, lies north of the wall).
The Percys were the leading house in the North, and if the Scots came it was their burden to raise men from five northern counties to repel them. They had rivals, of course, so while Henry de Percy, the First Baron Percy, was recognized as the strongest northern lord, there was also Neville, Lord of Raby, Clifford, Lord of Westmorland, Lucy, Lord of Cockermouth, Dacre, Lord of Gilsland and Umfraville, Lord of Redesdale. They were all proud families with their own pedigrees, but the Percys were kings in the North. In the words of historian Alexander Rose, “In that tumultuous place, the Westminster-based, Southern king’s writ hardly ran. In Percy country, there was Percy law backed by a Percy army paid for by Percy money.”2
