Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  Marguerite and Blanche were made to watch this ordeal; Blanche, wife of the eldest son, Louis, was taken to a castle, Château Gallard in Normandy, where according to one account her husband sent his brutish cousin Robert of Artois to offer a pardon if she admitted her daughter was not his. Robert, an enormous, thuggish, and sometimes charming man, then tried to rape her, but she successfully persuaded him of the dire consequences he might face for violating the king’s daughter-in-law, even a disgraced one.

  Jeanne, the wife of middle brother Philippe, had only been guilty of concealing her sister and sister-in-law’s adultery, and was eventually allowed back to her husband’s side, thanks to her scheming mother Mahaut, who many believed to be a witch and a poisoner. Philippe gave her the l’Hôtel de Nesle to live in, the same spot her sister and cousin had taken their lovers, where “stories persisted down the ages that Jeanne, watching from her window in the tower, would send for passing students and, having exhausted their virility, would then have them tied in sacks and thrown from the top of the tower to drown in the Seine below.”21 Neither adulterous princess would ever see freedom again; indeed they both died within weeks of their husbands ascending the throne, rather conveniently.

  Perhaps, some wondered, Isabella may have wanted to make her own son the king of France, and by discrediting her female relatives would also tarnish the blood of their offspring, who would always now be suspected of bastardry. If this was the true motive, rather than fraternal loyalty, then she had helped bring disaster to her country.

  That year, just months after executing the Templars, Philippe the Fair died, replaced by his son Louis X “Le Hutin”—the Quarrelsome. Some months later a comet passed over the city and was visible for three nights, an event almost always considered an ill-omen.

  *This was the northern French rendition of the southern troubador, singers of epic tales and romances.

  6

  “WE BOW DOWN BEFORE NO MAN”

  The Unsullied are not men. Death means nothing to them.

  —MISSANDEI

  Herodotus wrote his Histories during the high point of Classical Greek civilization, the fifth century, but by the time Pytheas sailed to Britain it had waned with the collapse of Athens and Sparta and the rise of the Macedonians, a semi-barbaric mountain people to the north fond of excessive drinking. A Song of Ice and Fire takes place in a world filled with the memories of a far greater civilization across the Shivering Sea, and so it was in medieval Europe with Greece and Rome. Although most Englishmen of the fifteenth century would not have travelled far from their villages, let alone crossed the perilous water, which might involve three days of seasick-filled misery, the ghosts of ancient peoples lingered in the minds of the more educated.

  The first great civilization was Old Ghis, a city in Essos built on slavery. Long before Westeros had emerged out of barbarism, the Ghiscari had developed heavily-disciplined military units using tall shields, called lockstep legions. In this they resembled the hoplite tactics of classical Greece, and in particular Sparta, but in its giant pyramids built on slave labor, Ghis could be Egypt; and in their destruction at the hands of rivals, in this case Valyria, they resemble Carthage, defeated and razed by Rome in 146BC.

  The Ghiscari colonized and subjugated their neighbours, but after a thousand years their power in turn faded and they were replaced by the Valyrians, who reduced Ghis when they built their own empire. After the Doom of Valyria, Ghis rose again, although nowhere as powerful as it once was, and they now bought and bred slaves rather than winning them by conquest. They had also stopped speaking their native Grazdan tongue and come to use High Valyrian instead. This can happen in real life: the ancient Assyrians eventually adopted the language of their neighbors, the Arameans, having conquered them, so that today some of their descendants in Iraq and Syria still speak Aramaic, also the mother tongue of Jesus Christ.

  At its peak, Valyria was the greatest city in the world, surrounded by shining walls within which a number of rival houses competed for dominance, rising and falling in bloody internal conflicts.1 Like with Rome, the Valyrians had no monarchs and called their empire “the Freehold,” rather than the kingdom; their rulers were termed archons (a name borrowed from ancient Greece, meaning “lord” or “prince”)2 and were chosen by the ruling families, although one clan might dominate for periods, as in Rome.

  After the fall of Old Ghis and Valyria these old civilizations were succeeded by the present-day slave cities Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen. The latter is ruled by an elite class calling themselves the Great Masters while Astapor has an army of eunuchs, the Unsullied. Yunkai, the yellow or “Great city,” is ruled by the Wise Masters but is regarded by Westeroi as being filled with corruption and financed by the selling of “boy-whores.”

  The Valyrians learned slavery from Ghis but they increased its use hugely as their empire, like Rome, expanded in all directions. They needed copper and tin for the bronze used in weapons and monuments, and iron for the steel to make swords; the number who died in the Valyrian mines is said to be “so large as to surely defy comprehension.”3 One of their great advantages was their use of Valyrian steel, created by folding iron numerous times to balance and remove impurities and the use of spells, or at any rate arts unknown to men of Westeros. Swords of Valyrian steel are highly prized, and while the smiths of Qohor claim to know the art of making them, no one is entirely sure how to do it anymore.

  Curiously, something very similar did exist in real life: Damascus steel, which was developed in India before the time of Christ and used in swords in the Islamic world during the medieval period. There are many stories attached to Damascus steel, such as its ability to cut through rifle barrels or that a hair falling on the blade would be chopped in half, but even rigorous scientific analysis has shown it to be extraordinary for its time. Yet by 1750, due to the loss of trade routes between India and the Middle East, the technique had been forgotten. And despite modern technological advancement, the exact science behind the making of this remarkable and versatile material is lost.

  Before classical Greece there were the ancient Minoan and Mycenaean peoples, who lived during the Homeric Age of Heroes which ended around 1100BC with the start of the Greek Dark Ages. This civilizational collapse destroyed numerous societies across the eastern Mediterranean; around this period the worlds of the Egyptians, Trojans, Hittites, Syrians, and Canaanites all fell or suffered serious calamities, the product either of a natural cataclysm or uncontrollable piracy by groups collectively known as the Sea Peoples. Some modern historians even believe that there was a giant “World War Zero” around the time between the Near Eastern powers, or that they were overwhelmed by northern barbarians.4

  From the palaces of the Mycenaean era the landscape of Greece reverted to one of isolated villages, from which emerged in the eighth century BC the poleis, or city-state (from where we get “politics” and “police”). Culturally Greece would lay the foundations of Western civilization, but the core of Greek power was, as with Old Ghis, military. The hoplite system involved units of troops in tight formation whose shields collectively protected the group and who engaged in the extremely bloody wars Greeks fought against each other.

  Western civilization begins with the abduction of a woman, although as with King Robert’s war, it is ambiguous as to whether it is indeed force, or love. In The Iliad, an epic poem probably written sometime in the ninth century BC but relating to a far older war between Greeks and Trojans, Paris snatches Helen from her husband Menelaus, but as with Lyanna Stark, it not entirely clear whether she has been taken against her will. Until the twentieth century, the Trojan war was believed to have been entirely fictional, or at best highly metaphorical, but archaeological evidence has since provided convincing signs that it contained elements of truth; there certainly was a city in Ilium, now in north-west Turkey, and it was sacked around the time Homer’s story was set. Even the central storyline, the kidnapping of a noble woman by a rival, was always assumed to be about somethi
ng else, like trade or land—but recent analysis of pre-agricultural societies points to the very high level of warfare conducted over the kidnapping of females, so it’s not at all improbable.

  The Iliad and its sequel The Odyssey were passed down from generation to generation, sung by bards at feasts until, some four hundred years after the historical event, it was written down. Memorized by heart, it would initially have been sung; Homer’s opening words are “Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage, Black and Murderous.” Stories and epics were originally told in song form, and so Martin’s epic is rightly A Song of Ice and Fire.5

  Classical Greece reached its zenith in the fifth century BC, but it was perilously weakened by a ruinous thirty-year conflict now called the Peloponnesian War, the origins of which lay in the rivalry between the region’s two greatest city-states, Athens and Sparta. During the fifth century, Athens, the largest of these poleis, had been at the forefront not just of military and economic power but of political development, too, becoming the first state to give every free, adult male a say in government—rule of the people, they called it, or dēmokratia. It also developed the great philosophical schools of the ancient world, which were to last centuries, as well as inventing the theatre.

  City-state politics was marred by factional conflict, usually between groups favoring oligarchy (“rule by a few”) and democracy. Volantis, in the Free Cities, is divided between two parties, the Tigers and Elephants, the latter representing merchants and moneylenders and the former the traditional military-aristocratic elite. Likewise, Cleon, the populist in Astapor, takes his name from the Athenian general who represented the commercial class of the city and demanded renewed war against Sparta. (The playwright Aristophanes painted him as a demagogue.)

  And yet for all Athens’s achievements, it is Sparta that has always fascinated both historians and the wider public. While Athens gave the world theatre, philosophy, and science, Sparta was the ancestor of all authoritarian regimes and suppressed art, culture, and finance; almost all activities bar warfare, which was for this city-state the very reason for its existence. The Spartans also had some similarities to the Unsullied, the brutalized slave army of Astapor.

  Like the Unsullied, the Spartans were famed and feared warriors; during the Persian Wars from 490 to 479BC, when the city-states of Greece temporarily united to drive away the Empire of King Darius and his successor Xerxes, the Spartans performed one of the most famous acts of heroism in history when they sent three hundred warriors to the mountain pass of Thermopylae to block the way of the enormous Persian army, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It was a suicide mission, and these men went to their deaths with a stoicism that inspired the ancients and moderns alike, falling after thirty-six hours of brutal fighting. (Likewise, “The Three Thousand of Qohor” were a heavily outnumbered Unsullied force who fought the Dothraki.)

  Yet the differences between the Unsullied and Spartans also highlight their oddness to us: while the Unsullied were eunuchs, the men chosen for Thermopylae had to have fathered a child so that their line might survive. And whereas Athenians wore their hair short in what they saw as the civilized manner, the Spartans, like the Dothraki, saw long hair as a symbol of masculinity and strength.

  Sparta’s unique social structure had its origins in the eighth century BC, a time of unrest across Greece as the newly emerging city-states faced conflict between rich and poor. In many of these poleis this led to the replacement of kings by “tyrants,” that is usurpers who usually lasted two or three generations (the word did not have an entirely negative connotation at the time). However, the Spartans chose to avoid internal conflict by designing a system that would maximize equality between free males. According to legend, a powerful king, Lycurgus, received a Delphic oracle called his “Great Rhetra,” which contained the laws of Sparta. And the Spartans obeyed the law, without question.

  The system he devised was highly egalitarian. Indeed, Spartans called each other homoio, equals, and the key to their military success was the strong sense of comradeship the men shared; they all wore the same modest clothing and ate the same food, which was rationed strictly. But there was an extremely dark side to this settlement.

  THEIR CHOICE MAY BE BETWEEN BONDAGE AND DEATH, BUT THE CHOICE IS ALWAYS THERE.

  “The magnificence that is the Queen of Cities rests upon the back of slaves,” as Daenerys is told by Xaro Xhoan Daxos, one of the creepy men of Qarth. “Ask yourself, if all men must grub in the dirt for food, how shall any man lift his eyes to contemplate the stars? If each of us must break his back to build a hovel, who shall raise the temples to glorify the gods? For some men to be great, others must be enslaved.”6 This was the unchallenged belief throughout ancient Greece and Rome, where slavery was universal, and indeed slavery had been the norm in Europe until around the eleventh century, when under pressure from the Catholic Church it began to be abolished. Anglo-Saxon England, for example, had a slave population of at least 10 percent, and as high as a quarter in poorer, more remote areas, until the practice was abolished by William the Conqueror and his successors, replaced by the almost-as-awful serfdom. But enslaving non-Christians remained acceptable, and later the bloodstained profits of the Atlantic slave trade made the institution more racialized and on a far more horrifying scale; during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, slavery would have existed on the fringes of the Western consciousness, in the Middle East, but few would have experience of it, except if they were unlucky enough to be kidnapped by North African pirates—a menace until the eighteenth century in coastal areas.*

  In Rome, slaves might be freed and rise in society, but in Greece they were doomed to remain slaves forever, as were their children. But alone in antiquity, Sparta created a system of institutionalized racial slavery; the Spartans, having subjugated their Messenian neighbors in the southern Peloponnese, made them their Helots (“the captured”),7 that is eternal slaves. Every year Sparta would formally declare war on its neighbor so that any Spartiate (as full citizens were called—only the child of two Spartiates might become one) could commit murder legally; junior members of the Krypteia, an ancient secret police force formed to terrorize the slave population, would abduct and kill Helots just as the Unsullied of Essos were expected to murder babies in front of their mothers. It was, to put it mildly, not a very pleasant place.

  Helots belonged to the state, not to individual Spartiates, and so unlike in other slave-owning societies emotional ties did not develop between master and bondsman. Almost all slave-owning societies have devised some way of signaling the unfree out. While in Athens visitors noted with disgust that one could not tell slave and free men apart, in Sparta Helots had to wear a dog skin cap and leather tunic at all times. It was decreed by law that they “should be beaten a fixed number of strokes annually, besides any offence they committed, so that they would never forget that they were slaves,”8 something they were unlikely to do. If a Helot started to look too physically strong, they were executed and the Spartiate assigned them was fined.

  It was a remarkably cruel society—but not especially fun for the Spartiates either. At birth a Spartiate was selected by the elders, and those deemed to be weak were exposed to die, although exposure was fairly common in all pre-Christian European societies. If they made it that far, then at seven a Spartan boy joined the education system and lived with other young males, where they were trained to be obedient soldiers. The boys were led by a paidonomos, who was assisted by young men carrying whips and dishing out punishments. Boys were encouraged to steal food, but harshly punished if caught—not because they had committed theft but because they had not gotten away with it; the aim was to teach them cunning. Children were also to some degree shared communally, to such an extent that a man could discipline any other’s son for wrongdoing (their notion of child discipline, unsurprisingly, was rather harsh).

  The Spartans were also forced as young boys to listen to songs extolling the glory of the military. Their only poet, the seventh-century Tyrt
aeus, celebrated war as glorious fun, the boys being told to “stand up to men of the spear, with a terrifying din, as the adversaries clash rounded shield against rounded shield; awful will be the screams as they fall on one another, thrusting spears through the breasts of men.”

  Spartiates were expected to fight until the age of sixty, and constant training was compulsory—punishment for refusing to fight was death. However, a man who fathered three healthy sons was exempt from military service; after four he no longer had to make financial contributions to the state. On the other hand, Spartiate men were penalized for not marrying or marrying too old or for doing so with the wrong woman.

  Everything about their society had a military rationale, including their unique constitution, under which there were two kings, from two dynasties, the Agids and the Eurypontids; the idea being that neither would become too dominant, and one could always remain at home while the other went to war. Some other surviving aspects of their laws paint a puzzling picture of paranoia. Spartiates were not allowed to carry a light around in the dark, for example, so that they would be on full alert all the time. Presumably this caused lots of accidents, but there was a logic, as Sparta was vulnerable to rebellion by the Helots, including a major revolt that occurred in 464BC following an earthquake. This ended in failure and bloody reprisals, as slave revolts of the ancient world almost always did.

  In 490BC, Greece faced its greatest crisis when the Persian Empire sought its conquest, and Sparta would be instrumental in beating them back. At Plataea in 479, the Spartans helped drive the Persians out of Greece, “bristling like a wild animal at bay” in Plutarch’s words.9