Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  The Arabs had been introduced to Greek Fire.

  Perhaps the most dangerous weapon in Westeros is wildfire, a flammable substance impervious to water that may have been developed by the Targaryens. It is used with devastating effect at the Battle of Blackwater, where thousands of Stannis’s troops die, Davos recalling: “A flash of green caught his eye, ahead and off to port, and a nest of writhing emerald serpents rose burning and hissing from the stern of Queen Alysanne.”25

  The real wildfire would have been equally terrifying, and bizarre, and so effective it remained a state secret. “Greek Fire” was developed in 672 by chemists in Constantinople, a sort of Guild of Pyromancers, but it was probably originally brought to them by a Greek refugee from the Muslim invasion by the name of Kallinikos. He came from Syria with “a technique for projecting liquid fire through siphons,” using the black petroleum found throughout the Near East, which is refered to as far as back as the fifth century BC, although its raw power was not realized until the modern age.

  The core ingredient was crude oil from the Black Sea, mixed with wood resin, which made it adhersive. The Byzantines had found a way to heat this compound in sealed bronze containers, pressurizing it and then releasing the liquid through a nozzle and igniting it. It took great skill and engineering, especially onboard wooden boats, but then the Byzantines were Romans after all.

  The French chronicler Jean de Joinville described facing Greek fire when it was used against Crusaders in 1249:

  From the front as it darted towards us it appeared as large as a barrel of verjuice [highly acidic juice from unripe grapes], and the tail of fire that streamed behind it was as long as the shaft of a great lance. The noise it made in coming was like that of a thunderbolt falling from the skies; it seemed like a dragon flying through the air. The light this huge, flaming mass shed all around it was so bright that you could see right through the camp as clearly as if it were day.26

  The weapon was brought aboard hundreds of flame-throwing dromons, or war vessels, either sprayed using a pump or put in boxes and catapulted at the enemy; unmanned fireboats were also used, if the wind was right.27 In 2006, academic John Haldon published an account of an attempt to recreate it, photographs showing heated liquid coming from a narrow tube “with a loud roaring noise and a thick cloud of black smoke.”28 With a reconstructed siphon and oil from Crimea, flame was projected ten to fifteen meters and was “so intense that in a few seconds it completely burned a target boat.”

  After getting battered by Greek fire, the Arabs fell victim to a freak autumn storm on their return home. Not to be put off, they attacked again in 717, and this time did no better. In 814, the Bulgars were poised to attack Constantinople after defeating a Byzantine army, their leader Krum having had the Emperor Nicephorus’s body exposed naked on a stake, before turning his skull into a drinking cup. As the Bulgar army approached, rumors spread throughout the city of the weapons these barbarians would bring, of gigantic battering rams. However, on April 13, Holy Thursday, as he was about to attack, Krum had a sudden seizure, blood poured out from his mouth, nose, and ears, and he dropped dead.

  In the summer of 860, the people of the city endured another terrifying ordeal; on June 18, soon after the emperor had led a force on campaign against the Saracens, a fleet arrived from the Black Sea at the mouth of the Bospherous and headed toward the city, burning monasteries and pillaging towns, before arriving and casting their anchors by the Golden Horn. No one had even seen these people before, and the Patriarch asked who these “fierce and savage” warriors were, “ravaging the suburbs, destroying everything . . . thrusting their swords through everything, taking pity on nothing, sparing nothing.”29

  They were the Rus, the Vikings of the east, who, carrying their longships across the Great European Plain and down to the Black Sea, had come to a city so large it barely seemed to be of this earth. Urgent messengers were sent to Emperor Michael to alert him, but by the time he arrived the Rus had left, which many attributed to the intercession of the Virgin and her robe which had been carried shoulders-high around the city walls. Others said the Patriarch dipped the robe in the sea and a tempest destroyed the Russian fleet. The more prosaic explanation is that, finding the walls too difficult for their primitive technology to break into, they just gave up to pillage elsewhere.

  It was part of a great adventure for the Norsemen in the east; Scandinavians’ grave epitaphs back home in their runic alphabet boast of travels as far south as “Serkland,” the land of the Muslims (Saracens), and they traveled so far that a semi-permanent Viking colony may have even been established as far away as the Persian Gulf.30 They became a regular presence in the Queen of Cities, familiar but always feared. In Qarth, only a “few Dothraki” are permitted inside the city at one time, afraid of what large numbers might do; likewise, a maximum of fifty Rus were allowed into Constantinople at any one time in the tenth century. However, eventually they were incorporated into a guard for the emperor, called the Varangians, from the old Norse word for “pledged faith.” (The imperial palace itself was protected by the Vigla, or Watch, and among the highest positions in Constantinople was the droungarios tes Vigles, commander of the Watch.)31 Today in the Hagia Sophia, now a museum in Istanbul, one can see on the upper story graffiti left by these Vikings, the Norse name “Halfdan” being identifiable.

  So the Byzantines had tamed the Rus, although at huge sacrifice to one individual. The barbarian leader, Vladimir, had in 988 arrived as part of a military treaty in which he would send a force of six thousand fully-equipped Varangians. In return, he asked for one thing only, Emperor Basil’s sister Anna, prized even more for being porphyrogenita, “born in the purple” (i.e. when her father was ruler). Vladimir already had four wives and eight hundred concubines and ruled a people beyond the borders of civilization. When told of her fate, the princess wept bitter tears, accusing her family of selling her into slavery, and yet a young princess had little choice if her brother required her to marry a savage, especially a savage with an army behind him. The marriage agreement was honored—otherwise their new friends might soon become enemies. Reluctantly she went to the boat that would take her to the Rus city of Cherson, and the six thousand troops returned to Emperor Basil. The prince of Kiev was baptized and the Rus, who might have turned to Islam, fatefully adopted Christianity. Vladimir, despite his hundreds of concubines, became a saint on account of his work promoting Christianity; his Byzantine bride helped to build a number of churches, although she never bore him a child.

  Soon afterward, one of the most sordid figures in Byzantine history appears, the “strange and sinister figure of John the Orphantorophus,” a eunuch “who had risen, through his own intelligence and industry, from obscure and humble origins in Paphlagonia to be a highly influential member of the civil bureaucracy.”32 The eunuch had become director of the city’s principle orphanage, and had four younger brothers, of whom the two eldest were eunuchs too. They were money-changers and forgers, but despite this were also charming and handsome; the youngest, Michael, was in 1033 brought by his brother to meet the Emperor Romanos and his consort Zoe in formal audience where Zoe instantly fell in love, as his eunuch brother had planned. An affair began, which Romanos remained oblivious to, even after his sister had warned him.

  By this stage, among the most famous of all Varangians had turned up, the exiled half-brother of King Olaf of Norway. Olaf the Fat had become part of English folklore after pulling down London Bridge in 1014, and later he returned home and won praise from the Church as a great Christian ruler despite relentless fornication. Olaf’s policy of Christianization, however, had been bitterly resisted by some noblemen and, in 1028, he was defeated and killed in battle by an alliance led by the Danish king Canute. The defeat put Olaf’s fifteen-year-old half-brother Harald in mortal danger; he had been seriously wounded, but after escaping in the cold had come to the home of a peasant couple who took him in. Hunted in his native home, he had fled east and followed the Viking route down t
he rivers of Russia to Constantinople.

  Harald Hardrada, “hard-ruler,” as he was later known, grew into a 6’6” man-monster known as the Thunderbolt of the North. He was a brutal and enthusiastic fighter who took great pleasure in his acts of daring do, but was also an eccentric man who loved poetry almost as much as he loved fighting, which was a lot; he had one eyebrow higher than the other, blond hair, a long moustache, and huge hands and feet. (Likewise the Iron Born had a similar-sounding leader, Harwyn Hardhand, of whom it was said: “Tempered in the Disputed Lands, he proved to be as fierce afoot as he was at seat, routing every foe.”)33

  Harald became a noted warrior in Byzantium and there are many stories attached to his time there, and some of them may even be true. He battled with a lion in an arena after seducing a noblewoman, but heroically slew the animal, as he did with a giant serpent he encountered. He also left a trail of destruction across southern Italy fighting on behalf of the empire, an adventure he seemed to hugely enjoy.

  Yet when Harald returned to court he was drawn into imperial intrigue. Zoe and her young lover Michael had begun to openly flaunt their adultery and soon her husband was found dead in the bath; indecently soon afterwards Michael was crowned emperor and the couple married that same day. And yet the new leader was cursed, and as his epilepsy grew more serious he withdrew into a monastery, refusing to see his wife. John the eunuch, unwilling to lose power, insisted that Zoe replace Michael IV with his nephew, Michael V, who she adopted as her son. It was not long before the two tired of each other, and in 1042 when the young emperor had his new “mother” banished from her court her supporters had him blinded, along with his surviving uncle Constantine. Harald, who had fallen out of favor with the young emperor, took both their eyes out.34

  And yet the giant Viking soon found himself in trouble, for reasons that remain unclear, and was forced to flee. In the Battle of the Blackwater, Tyrion Lannister uses a giant chain to trap the fleet of Stannis, another historical tactic borrowed from the Byzantines. While Constantinople had depended on her walls, it was also protected by a great chain fixed across the Golden Horn that separated the city from the Genoan colony of Galata on the other side. Only one man is known to have broken the chain—Harald Hardrada, after breaking out of prison and taking Maria, a beautiful young relative of Zoe, who may or may not have been his lover.

  Harald and a group of Varangians seized two galleys in the Golden Horn and sailed off determined to jump the chain, with Maria as their hostage. Sailing toward the chain, Harald ordered for the oarsmen to sail full speed while the crew ran to the back, tilting the ship up so that it leaped into the air, before quickly running forwards to lean it back. The Vikings sailed into the Black Sea and freed Maria on the banks of the Bospherus, to be safely escorted back to the Byzantine court; a second galley failed to repeat the trick and its men were lost.35

  With Canute and his sons now dead, Harald finally made it home, where he edged his brother Olaf’s son Magnus off the throne. But there was one last adventure waiting for Harald, for Magnus had long before made a pact with Canute’s son Hardicanute, king of England, that whoever died first would leave the other his kingdom. Canute was dead, Hardicanute was dead, and now Magnus was dead, but the deal, in Harald’s mind, was still binding, and England his by right. And then, at the beginning of 1066, King Edward was dead too—and so began the war of the three kings.

  *Zeno was obsessed with an early form of backgammon and is best remembered for having once landed the most unlucky hand in history, which was recorded and reconstructed in the 19th century.

  21

  THE MAD KING

  “Burn them all,” he kept saying. “Burn them all.”

  —JAIME LANNISTER

  With France’s Charles V dying in 1380 there were now boys on the thrones of France as well as England, and both would end in tragedy, although for young Charles VI of France it would involve far greater suffering.

  Under the rule of the boy-king’s four uncles, France now brought the war to England, through its northern frontier, which proved rather a cultural shock. In Westeros, technology in the south is more advanced than the north, and even more so than beyond the Wall. The Wildlings cannot forge iron, but have amassed some weapons through trade or warfare. Only the Thenn, who live in an oasis of fertile land and are the most technologically advanced of the Free Folk, are able to mine tin and copper, the metals used to make bronze.1

  When the Scots asked for help from the French in 1385, the dashing nobleman Admiral de Vienne sailed north with fifteen thousand men, including eighty knights, as well as fifty thousand gold francs and fifty suits of armor, and lances and shields for his nobles.

  And yet the men from the lush Loire, Seine, and Rhone valleys had no idea just how impoverished Scotland was. “What kind of a country has the Admiral carried us to?” one Frenchman asked, calling it a place of “hard beds and ill nights.”2 The French were accustomed to “tapestried halls, goodly castles, and soft beds” and what they got were castles “bare and gloomy with primitive conditions and few comforts in a miserable climate. The damp stone huts of clan chieftains were worse, lacking windows or chimneys, filled with peat smoke and the smell of manure. Their inhabitants engaged in prolonged vendettas of organized cattle-raiding, wife-stealing, betrayal, and murder.”3 The Scots had no iron either, nor even leather for saddles, all of these having to be imported from the continent and they were stunned by the material wealth of their allies. “We never knewe what povertie meant tyll nowe,” one Scotsman told the admiral.4

  It was not long before there was a fight over supplies, after impoverished farmers had objected to foraging by French troops; over one hundred Frenchmen were killed in violence with local men over the course of a month. To further stretch the relationship, the French leader—defying all stereotypes—engaged in “guilty amour” with the king of Scotland’s cousin, which angered the monarch so much that he wished to kill him.

  It was also getting colder. In the 1380s, Normandy experienced very harsh winters with frequent snowfalls; in England the winter of 1385-6 was “wonderfully evil and hard.”5 The Scots and French under de Vienne burned their way through northern English villages, and a French chronicler recorded that his countrymen brought “murder, pillage and fire” to the north, “destroying all by sword or fire, mercilessly cutting the throats of peasants and anyone else they met, sparing no one on account of rank, age, or sex, not even the elderly or the infant at the breast.”6

  Jean le Bel, an eyewitness, wrote:

  These Scottish men are right hardy and sore travailing in harness and in wars. For when they will enter in England, within a day and a night they will drive their whole host twenty-four mile, for they are all a-horseback . . . They take with them no purveyance of bread and wine, for their usage and soberness is such in time of war, that they will pass in the journey a great long time with flesh half sodden, without bread, and drink of the river water without wine.7

  Facing them was Henry Percy, great-grandson of the man who had fallen in the catastrophic year of 1314, and now in charge of protecting the realm. And yet, while fighting along the border would continue for the next two decades, the French were soon out of the picture, faced with their own problems.

  The young king Charles had insisted on marriage just four days after he met his betrothed, a fourteen-year-old German princess called Isabeau who arrived in a hugely expensive and luxurious carriage, wearing the priceless crown that the king had sent to her as a gift. Before the marriage, Isabeau, like any woman due to marry a king of France, was inspected naked by the ladies of the court to “determine if she were properly formed for bearing children.” As the next decade would show, she was indeed properly formed to do so, although whether all those children in question were the king’s is more of a mystery.

  The wedding was a fabulous occasion, and after the feast the ladies of court put the couple to bed, the king “so much desir[ing] to find her in his bed.” A chronicler reported that “the
y spent the night together in great delight, as you can well believe.”8 Alas a marriage rushed into in a fit of youthful passion would descend into contempt and hatred, and Charles’s mind would fall apart, followed by his kingdom.

  At Queen Isabeau’s coronation she was upstaged by her sister-in-law, the Milanese Valentina Visconti, wife of the king’s brother Louis d’Orléans. Her rival was escorted by 1,300 knights and wore a wedding robe featuring 2,500 pearls and “sprinkled with diamonds.”9 Valentina had had an unprecedented dowry of half a million gold francs, as well as part of Piedmont, the rich province of Italy between Lombardy and Provence. Before Valentina was set for France, Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, left for Pavia, unable to face the departure of his dear daughter without weeping. Young women were “peace-weavers,” their job to make alliances between rival lands—but this did not make it any less upsetting for the girls or their families.

  And soon a darkness overcame the realm. In 1392, there was an assassination attempt on Charles’s friend and adviser Olivier de Clisson, the son of the pirate Jeanne. De Clisson had switched sides in 1369, despite his own father’s murder, after his squire was killed by the English. De Clisson swore never “to give quarter to any Englishman” after that, and the following day attacked an English fortress, taking fifteen captives; he ordered for the fifteen men to be released one by one, and as each prisoner walked through the door he chopped off their head with a huge axe.