Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  Vengeance was a common theme in honor culures like Westeros or medieval Europe, often passed through stories and songs, although people recognized the downsides. At one point Ellaria Sand wonders: “Oberyn wanted vengeance for Elia. Now the three of you want vengeance for him . . . If you should die, must El and Obella seek vengeance for you? Is this how it goes, round and round forever? I ask again, where does it end?”9

  Just as The Rains of Castamere recalls old scores settled, so in real life the Icelandic Njals saga told of a fifty-year-old vendetta, and that was relatively brief for feuds at the time, which could go on for several generations. Today such vendettas still exist only in very unusually clannish parts of Europe, worst affected being Albania, which has had twelve thousand feuds in the past twenty-five years.10 That they are illegal seems to make not the slightest difference to this ancient custom.

  As states emerged, so more efficient if not fairer methods of justice also developed. In England, trial by ordeal had evolved in Saxon times, invoking the Almighty to decide who was guilty. A suspect might have to hold two hot irons and walk nine paces, and then have his hands bandaged; if they had not healed after a week he was hanged. Defendants might also suffer trial by drowning, to see if they were rejected by the water, or having their hand plunged into boiling water; the only exemptions were priests, who could choose “trial by morsel,” which involved eating a certain amount of food in a given time—understandably a rather more popular option. Women were also prevented from trial by cold water on account of modesty, and there was criticism of “priests who peer eagerly with shameless eyes at the women who have stripped before they enter the water.”11

  Not everyone was convinced. Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, and one of the great early skeptics who was suspected of atheism, wrote that the ordeal “is not in accord with nature and does not lead to truth . . . How could a man believe that the natural heat of glowing iron will become cool or cold without an adequate cause . . . or that because of a seared conscience the element of cold water will refuse to accept the accused?”

  By the late Middle Ages local lords no longer had the power of life and death they once enjoyed during the period of the Anarchy. One definition of a lord was the possession of a gallows, giving them jurisdiction over lawbreakers,12 and in the early thirteenth century there were sixty-five private gallows in Devon alone, which would not have had more than fifty thousand people.13 Increasingly, though, the royal government exercised the sole right to take life.

  Trial by torture was the more enlightened form of punishment used on the continent. In Germany, people lived in fear of die verfuchte Jungfer, the dreaded old maid, which “embraced the condemned with metal arms, crushed him in a spiked hug, and then opened, letting him fall, a mass of gore, bleeding from a hundred stab wounds, all bones broken, to die slowly in an underground hole of revolving knives and sharp spears.”14

  Another popular form, however, was trial by battle, alternatively known as the Judgment of God. Duelling is an ancient way of solving an argument—The Iliad describes two warriors fighting a duel over Helen of Troy—and the Vikings held such combats on islands where a circle of stones was laid out to mark the arena. Indeed, a man could claim another’s land and even his wife by challenging him to a duel.

  In the earlier Middle Ages, anyone could resort to judicial combat and public duels took place among peasants and town folk as well as nobles. But as class and status was marked out in every sphere in life, knights fought with swords and lances, while peasants used staves with iron heads. In civil duels, principals could hire champions to fight in their place, but in criminal duels two parties had to fight in person, since the penalty meant death, although women, the elderly, or the infirm could get a champion, a professional fighter to battle on their behalf; if they were poor their husbands would have to make do. In Westeros, Tyrion opts for trial by combat, finding a champion first in Bron and then in Oberyn Martell; Margaery opts for ecclesiastical court hearing. Neither is exactly fair.

  These fights could be just as vicious as portrayed on the screen. In a duel in Flanders in 1127, “the two exhausted combatants finally threw down their weapons and fell to wrestling on the ground and punching each other with their iron gauntlets, until one reached under the other’s armor and tore away his testicles, killing him on the spot.”15

  They could also be absurd, such as in 1372 outside Notre-Dame in Paris when a man fought a duel with a dog. This took place after one of the king’s favorites had been found murdered on his estate outside the capital. It was a mystery but the deceased’s pet, a giant greyhound, growled and barked every time it saw one Richard Macaire. He was known to have been jealous of the dead man and the king ordered for a duel to be held—Macaire got a club while the dog had a large barrel open at both ends where it could hide; waiting cautiously, the animal suddenly jumped at the man’s throat, dragging him down until he surrendered. Afterwards he confessed and was hanged.16

  Yet these events were in decline. In England, Henry II had established in 1166 a public prosecution service and a central court of justice at Westminster, and helped to create the jury system, which had its origins in Saxon traditions whereby a man could bring character witnesses. An accused was called to “be at your law twelve-handed,” requiring him to find eleven “oath helpers”; the idea was that twelve men swearing on holy relics couldn’t all be lying, but they were in essence simply character witnesses, judging the accused on previous behaviour (the opposite of today’s jury system). These men were supposed to arrive at the “truthful answer”—verdict in French.

  Trial by battle was therefore something of a relic by that point, although not entirely finished. Two nobles fought a duel in 1430 at Arras, and, in 1455, two burghers battled with clubs before a crowd at Valenciennes, and, in 1482, France’s very last duel took place at Nancy. Combat survived in England even later and, in 1583, a duel to the death was fought in Ireland with Queen Elizabeth’s approval.

  Trial by combat was an accepted part of the justice system but as it faded, replaced by either trial by jury or torture, it evolved into the illegal practice of dueling, a highly ritualized practice that continued the judicial traditions, including a drawn sword as an appeal to duel, or throwing down of gloves—jeter le gage. Dueling remained as an aristocratic past time for many centuries, costing many lives needlessly, and Europeans often took up arms over the stupidest of reasons if they felt their honor was insulted. In one case, two Italian men fought a duel over the respective merits of the poets Tasso and Ariosto, during which one of them was mortally wounded; as he lay dying, the man admitted he’d never even read the poet he was supposedly championing (and presumably he never would now). The craze faded in the nineteenth century, increasingly clamped down on by the authorities and viewed with social disapproval, and, in England especially, mockery.17

  “YOU RAPED HER, YOU MURDERED HER. YOU KILLED HER CHILDREN.”

  De Carrouges was now in mortal danger, and had Le Gris kept the knife in the wound it would have been fatal—but believing his opponent to be beaten, he took it out. And yet he was not finished: gathering the last of his fading strength, the aging warrior gave it one last push, seizing his mortal enemy Le Gris with his left hand, ferociously grabbing his helmet and dragging him down to the ground.

  De Carrouges jumped on Le Gris, desperately trying to stab through the steel before he lost too much blood and faded away. His sword blunted, he used his dagger handle to smash open the face plate and tore it off, now demanding his enemy admit his guilt. Le Gris, pinned to the ground, cried out that he was innocent and de Carrouges thrust his dagger into his neck. Le Gris’s throat gurgled, his body shuddered and then he went still. Exhausted, de Carrouges turned toward a figure in the crowd, bleeding and exhausted, and walked over to kiss his wife.

  *Unlike the Parliament of London, Paris’s Parlement was a law court, not a law-making body.

  33

  THE STALLION WHO MOUNTS THE WORLD

>   The Dothraki follow only the strong.

  —JORAH MORMONT

  In 1237, three riders appeared outside the city of Ryazan, 120 miles south of Moscow. To the gathered townspeople the figure at the front, a woman, shouted “One-tenth of everything! Of horses, of men, of everything! One tenth!” The cityfolk replied no, and the horsemen rode off. A few months later it awoke to the deafening thunder of horses; hundreds and thousands of horses.

  “To the east, a black band of horsemen is hurtling across the horizon toward Ryazan under a dawn sky . . . the morning streets fill with slashing, cutting horsemen. People scream, body parts fly, pools of blood form in the fresh snow. Plumes of black smoke rise into a vermillion sky.”1 The city folk were slaughtered, men, women and children alike. The Mongols had arrived.

  In Essos there live “dark-haired, copper-skinned riders, organized in bands of male warriors called khalasars, each with a khal at their head,” living a nomadic life on horseback and preying on nearby towns and lives.2 They are the Dothraki, so famed for their devastating fighting skills that the “Dothraki Sea is ringed with ruined cities ravaged by the horselords, and their reputations terrify those in their path.”3 These cities sometimes pay tribute to the Dothraki but also buy their poor wretched captives off them. The horsemen prey on the peaceful Lhazareen, “Lamb-men,” who tend flocks east of the Steppes until the Dothraki turn up and destroy their town, enslaving and raping.

  These people live in yurts and eat a diet almost entirely comprising of meat, including goat, duck, dog and, most of all, horse. Horses are their lifeblood, so central to their culture that even their name for themselves in their own language, “Dothraki,” literally means “riders.”

  Viserys Targaryen describes the Dothraki as savages and certainly they aren’t urbane: “Excessive drinking, feasting on roasted meats, public sex, ululation, howling rather than music, and loud and blatant boasting; these are the hallmarks of Dothraki celebration.”4 As Jorah Mormont says in the very first episode, when the young Daenerys sits awkwardly in her chair while watching the event descend into a bloody orgy: “A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is considered a dull affair.”

  Nomadic horsemen have been a menace to settled people since the dawn of history. For the ancient Greeks, the Scythians, hard-drinking barbarians from what is now the Ukraine, were seen as the antithesis to everything civilized—living outside of cities and dressing barbarically in trousers, they even drank their wine straight, whereas the Greeks diluted it with water. The Scythians were difficult to deal with, as Persia’s Cyrus the Great found out when he tried to conquer them: “His head was then carried around in a skin filled with blood . . . so that the thirst for power that had inspired him could now be quenched.”5

  Perhaps the most terrifying nomads of the ancient world were the Huns, who came from central Asia during the last, chaotic years of the Roman Empire. The Huns were so devoted to the horseman’s life that they even slept in the saddle. Everything about them seemed bestial to the settled Romans, including their tunics made from field mice stitched together and their habit of warming meat by putting it between their thighs and their horses. The Huns also looked strange, and later skeletal examinations reveal that they carried out cranial deformation of the young, sticking bandanges around the skull and so causing the head to grow pointed. (In Essos there are a nomadic group even further East than the Dothraki called the Jogos Nhai, who also do this.)6

  The Huns were led by the terrifying Attila, who remains one of the most famous names in history, mostly because of the large-scale devastation he caused. Just as Khal Drogo had married the Westerosi Daenerys Targaryen in a bizarre wedding between civilized princess and savage, as her brother calls him, the Hunnish leader Attila had been promised the hand of Honoria, sister of the Emperor Valentinian III; or at least that’s how Attila interpreted it when he was sent a wedding ring in 450AD along with a call for military help. He asked for the western empire as a dowry and got half of Gaul. Later Valentinian denied him his bride and so Attila invaded Italy and left a trail of misery there, even threatening Rome itself.

  Like Khal Drogo, Attila would lay cities to waste, but also like Drogo he would die a mundane death that did not live up to expectations, succumbing to a nosebleed at a feast while drunk and choking on his own blood.7 Attila’s body was encased in three coffins, one of gold, one silver, and one iron, covered first with the spoils of war and then earth, and afterwards everyone involved in the burial ceremony was put to death so that it remained a secret—and to this day the tomb has never been found.

  Various other nomadic peoples emerged out of the steppes down the centuries. There was the Oghuz tribe, encountered by the widely-travelled Arab writer Ibn Fadlan, who estimated that they owned ten thousand horses and ten times that many sheep. “They live in felt tents, pitching them first in one place and then in another,” he wrote. “They live in poverty, like wandering asses. They do not worship God, nor do they have any recourse to reason . . . They do not wash after polluting themselves with excrement or urine . . . [and] have no contact with water, especially in winter.” One night the wife of one of the Oghuz men in attendance, the Arab recalled with horror, “as we were talking, she bared her private parts and scratched while we stared at her. We covered our faces with our hands and each said: ‘I seek forgiveness from God.’” The husband found the visitors’ prudishness amusing.8

  Then there were the Xiongnu, who controlled grasslands to the north of China, and were described by a contemporary as “barbaric, willing to eat raw meat and drink blood” and truly a people who “have been abandoned by heaven.”9 On the other hand, the Khazars of the Caucasus mountains were so effective against Muslim invaders that in the eighth century the Byzantines sought marriage alliances with them. They eventually became Jewish, unusually. The Khazar khagan had twenty-five wives, according to Ibn Fadlan; each was a member of a different tribe and the daughter of its ruler, and these smaller groups recognized the overlordship of the Khazars.

  Yet all nomads paled into insignificance besides the dreaded Mongols.10

  THE WOMB OF THE WORLD

  One westerner wrote of the Mongols: “They [are] like beasts . . . They live on wild roots and on meat pounded tender under the saddle . . . are ignorant of the use of the plow and of fixed habitation . . . If you inquire . . . whence they come and where they were born, they cannot tell you.”11

  Until their unexpected rise to world power, the Mongols were one of five tribal confederations living in the Mongolian plateau, fractious groups whom the Chinese emperors had encouraged to fight each other, which they were happy to do. The Mongols wore the “skins of dogs and mice,” and one contemporary described them as “living like animals, guided neither by faith nor by law, simply wandering from one place to another, like wild animals grazing.” It was said that “they regarded robbery and violence, immorality and debauchery as deeds of manliness and excellence.”12

  However, during the thirteenth century the steppes enjoyed unusually mild and wet conditions, allowing for a huge increase in the number of horses that could be fed. And it was at this time that a highly effective and highly dangerous leader united them; Temujin, or “blacksmith,” was born in 1162 “clutching in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knuckle-bone,” according to Mongol tradition, which was interpreted as meaning he would have great glories ahead. That he certainly did.

  Temujin, descended from a warrior called Boerte Chino, “grayish white wolf,” was orphaned at age nine after some rivals poisoned his father. As he grew into a man, he recruited a band of allies called nokjor, a word denoting one who renounced allegiance to tribe or faction and instead followed a unifying leader. In 1206, Temujin, having defeated rival clan leaders, assumed the title of Cinggis, or Genghis Khan—universal ruler, from the Turkic word tengiz, “the ocean” or “strong.”13 From then until his death in 1227, he created the largest contiguous empire in history, stretching from the Caspian to the Pacific—the real-life
Stallion who Mounts the World, the long-prophesized Dothraki lord who will conquer the entire globe.

  Along the way the Mongols left a trail of bodies, the 13th century Persian historian Juvani calling their empire a “a peace of smoking ruins.” In 1219, the invaders arrived in what is now Iran, where they “came, they sapped, they burned, they slew, they plundered and they departed.”14 It was said that “they killed women, men, children, ripped open the bodies of the pregnant and slaughtered the unborn.”* In the city of Nishapur, the corpses were piled up to form a series of enormous pyramids to serve as a warning. One high-ranking official, Inalchuq, Governor of Otrar (in modern Kazakhstan) was executed on the orders of Genghis Khan in 1219 by having molten gold poured into his eyes and ears. The following year the Khan brought one hundred thousand Mongols to flatten the city of Bamiyan in Bactria; afterwards it was known as the Screaming City or Silent City.

  Genghis Khan died in 1227, but his empire was inherited first by sons and then by grandsons who continued in a similar vein. Not long after, the Mongols arrived in Kiev and set fire to a church with the occupants inside; in 1241, they flooded into central Europe where, on April 9, an army led by the King of Poland and Duke of Silesia was devastated, the duke’s head being paraded on a lance along with nine sacks filled with the ears of the European dead. Two days later the Hungarians were crushed. Panic gripped the continent, but luckily, though, the khan died soon after and the Mongols fell into internal squabbling. However, the Tartars, one tribe of the Mongols, took over Russia from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and such was their importance in the founding of that great empire that a third of the old Russian aristocracy had Tartar names.15