Iron, Fire and Ice
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18. Shahar, Shulamith: Childhood in the Middle Ages, translation by Chaya Galai. Routledge, 1990.
19. This story may have grown in the telling, to put it mildly, but at the very least it reflects their enduring romance.
CHAPTER 4
1. British Isles is a contentious name in Ireland, although no alternative name has ever been found to replace it.
2. Martin, George R.R., Garcia, Elio M. Jr., Antonsson, Linda The World of Ice and Fire.
3. Also called ‘frozen fire.’
4. As written in The World of Ice and Fire, which is told as if in the style of a well-educated Renaissance man.
These statistics, based on the skulls of those people unlucky to live between 4000 and 3200 BC, only include head wounds, and it is also likely that the natives used deer antlers to stab each other to death http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060518-skulls.html.
5. http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence/transcript?language=en.
6. Mallory, J.P. The Origins of the Irish.
7. http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/09/135962.
8. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13082240.
9. The nature of Pictish is extremely disputed. It may have been Celtic, Germanic or indigenous.
10. There may be confusion because the Normans and French invaders of 1066 sometimes called themselves ‘Romanz,’ the concept of Frenchness having not really been established yet.
11. Martin, George R.R. A Dange With Dragons.
CHAPTER 5
1. A nice description of this can be found in Ian Mortimer’s A Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England.
2. Bergreen, Laurence Marco Polo.
3. Quoted by contemporary Walter of Guisborough.
4. Asbridge, Thomas The Perfect Knight.
5. The taxable revenue of Holy Island just out of the border went from £202 in 1296 to £21 in 1326. From 1299-1316 annual tithes in Norham went from £162 to £2.
6. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
7. Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones.
8. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Quoted in Morris, Marc A Great and Terrible King.
12. According to The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, written around 1346.
13. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
14. In his poem ‘The Curse Upon Edward.’
15. Weir, Alison Isabella.
16. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
17. The Annales Paulini.
18. Weir, Alison Isabella.
19. Weir, Alison Isabella.
20. Weir, Alison Isabella.
21. Horne, Alistair Seven Ages of Paris.
CHAPTER 6
1. This backstory is explained in a sort of fake history, The World of Ice and Fire, supposedly by a maestar although actually by George R.R. Martin, Elio M. Garcia and Linda Antonsson.
2. Literally ‘to rule,’ monarch meaning ‘one ruler.’
3. Martin, George R.R., Garcia, Elio M. Jr., Antonsson, Linda The World of Ice and Fire.
4. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle.
5. This point is made in Ayelet Haimson Luskkov’s You Win or You Die, so I cannot claim credit for it.
6. Martin, George R.R. A Dance With Dragons.
7. The precise etymology of this word is disputed. It may refer to the name of one of the Messinian villages.
8. Hall, Edith The Ancient Greeks.
9. Ibid.
10. Told by the Roman Plutarch in his book The Sayings of the Spartans.
11. Two of the 300 actually made it home. One, Aristodemus, was half-blinded and so told to return home, where he was treated as a coward. Another was returning from being sent as an envoy and so missed the crucial battle, and so when he got home was also disgraced and hanged himself.
12. Hall, Edith The Ancient Greeks.
13. Plutarch.
14. Wilkinson, Toby The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. He wrote: ‘Indeed, it is remarkable that they were not afflicted by more serious congenital conditions.’
CHAPTER 7
1. Mary Beard estimates it as 13% while Alison Futrell, in The Roman Games: Historical Sources in Translation, puts it at 19%.
2. Holland, Tom Dynasty.
3. As Tom Holland wrote in Dynasty, he wished to ‘rub the noses of the nobility in their own irrelevance and desuetude, there was nothing any longer to keep him from the greatest stage of all.’
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Tacitus.
7. http://blogs.transparent.com/latin/game-of-thrones-ancient-rome-part-i/.
8. Tacitus’s Agricola.
9. Roman History by Cassius Dio.
10. http://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-genome-sequenced.html.
11. A theory first suggested in The 10,000 Year Explosion by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.
12. Tacitus’s Agricola.
This is a subject that remains controversial and attracts some pretty wild speculation. The full details can be summarized here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legio_IX_Hispana.
13. From an interview with BBC Radio 4’s ‘Front Row’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00t0cvx.
14. http://blog.english-heritage.org.uk/30-surprising-facts-hadrians-wall/.
15. Roman History by Cassius Dio.
16. The film in question is the 2004 King Arthur with Clive Owen and Kiera Knightley
17. This is at least the traditional explanation, although much debated by historians, some would say debunked.
18. Bowman, Alan. K (ed) The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 11.
19. This is according to a source a century later who was admittedly anti-Persian. The true fate of the emperor is unknown. Valerian persecuted Christians and by the time of the writer the Persians were too, so it illustrated both Persian cruelty and the fact that a terrible fate awaited those who mistreated Christians. Other sources claim he was well-treated.
20. http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Doom_of_Valyria.
21. Recorded by Gildas, a sixth-century monk in his ‘Ruin and Destruction of Britain.’
CHAPTER 8
1. Poole, A.F. Domesday to Magna Carta.
2. Bartlett, Robert The Making of Europe.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Bartlett, Robert England under the Norman and Angevin Kings.
8. Ibid.
9. From his Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland.
10. Gillingham, John Conquest, Catastrophe and Recovery.
11. Larrington, Carolyne Winter is Coming.
12. From the Orkneyinga Saga.
13. The cause of the dire wolves’ extinction is still a cause for debate, although certainly they disappeared around the same time that humans turned up in the Americas.
14. Gillingham, John Conquest, Catastrophe and Recovery.
15. From his memoirs, Commentaries.
16. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
17. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
CHAPTER 9
1. Pliny’s Natural History.
2. Frankel, Valerie Estelle Winter is Coming.
3. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/were-europes-mysterious-bog-people-human-sacrifices/472839/.
4. http://gameofthronesandnorsemythology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/ragnarok-song-of-ice-fire.html.
5. Parker, Philip The Northmen’s Fury.
6. Whittock, Martyn A Brief History of Life in the Middle Ages.
7. Bartlett, Robert England under the Norman and Angevin Kings.
8. The always-skeptical William of Newburgh wrote ‘one would not easily believe that corpses come
out of their graves and wander around, animated by I don’t know what spirit to terrorize or harm the living, unless there were cases in our times, supported by ample testimony.’ He did not suffer bullshit easily.
9. Ibid.
10. Bartlett, Robert England under the Norman and Angevin Kings.
11. The Chronicon Anglicanum.
12. A Game of Thrones.
13. From the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Battle of Brunanburh,’ written sometime in the 10th century.
14. Frankel, Valerie Estelle Winter is Coming.
15. http://www.irelandseye.com/aarticles/culture/talk/banshees/werewolf.shtm.
16. Angela, Alberto A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome.
17. Frankopan, Peter Silk Roads.
18. Nigosian, Solomon The Zoroastrian Faith: Tradition and Modern Research.
19. First mentioned in Ziauddin Barani’s History of Firoz Shah.
20. Van Woerkens, Martine The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India.
CHAPTER 10
1. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
2. Kelly, John The Great Mortality.
3. Other sources suggest there may have been one or two days respite.
4. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
5. Ibid.
6. Bartlett, Robert England under the Norman and Angevin Kings.
7. https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/06/12/aside-angus-maddison/.
8. Kelly, John The Great Mortality.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
12. Horne, Alistair Seven Ages of Paris.
13. http://www.res.org.uk/details/mediabrief/10547499/ECONOMIC-ROOTS-OF-JEWISH-PERSECUTIONS-IN-MEDIEVAL-EUROPE.html.
14. Rosen, William The Third Horseman.
15. Ibid.
16. ‘Mair fell than wes ony devill in hell’, as a chronicler put it.
17. The evidence for this relationship is not so clear cut, it is fair to say. They certainly had an intimate friendship which damaged the king’s marriage.
18. McKisack, May The Fourteenth Century.
19. Weir, Alison Isabella.
20. Weir, Alison Isabella.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Quoted in Ibid.
24. Castor, She-Wolves.
25. However it had an immunity clause that said his land should be spared if he was attacked, which rather calls into question his motive.
26. Well, possibly.
27. Weir, Alison Isabella.
28. This is the theory suggested by her biographer Alison Weir.
29. Frankel wrote in Winter is Coming: ‘With her constant insistence on “courtesy as a lady’s armor,” Sansa demonstrates her love for medieval “courtesy books”—primers on proper behavior written mainly between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.’
30. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
31. There is probably some degree of artistic license involved in this story, which is otherwise the only thing most people know about him. It was also reported that in jail he was mistreated, mocked and made to shave off his hair and beard with cold water from a ditch, then dressed in old clothes, and made to swallow rotting food and a crown of hay placed on his head, the aim being to slowly kill him. However Alison Weir doubts the source.
32. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
CHAPTER 11
1. Freeman, Charles A New History of Early Christianity.
2. A Game of Thrones.
3. http://www.onreligion.co.uk/religion-in-game-of-thrones/.
4. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/.
5. Lewis, David Levering God’s Crucible.
6. The contemporary Zacharias of Mytilene.
7. Kelly, John The Great Mortality.
8. The theory that Westeros equals Europe is here http://www.quora.com/Are-Westeros-Kingdoms-inspired-by-real-life-countries-and-peoples The Iron Islands are not the Viking kingdoms of the islands of Scotland, Man and Ireland, but Scandinavia itself. In this theory the North is eastern Europe, with White Harbor translating as St Petersburg; the Slavic lands of north-east Europe were the last to leave the old gods behind, with some parts of the Baltic remaining pagan until the 13th century. The Westerlands, rich in mines, serves as a substitute for Britain, which was enriched by tin and later coal; both also have lions as symbols. In this comparison the Riverlands are the Low Countries and the Rhineland region of Germany, a region dominated by rivers, with good farming land that is nonetheless vulnerable to conquering armies. The Crownlands represent eastern Germany, forested land in the middle of continent that is often fought over.
9. Martin, George R.R., Garcia, Elio M. Jr., Antonsson, Linda The World of Ice and Fire.
10. Bartlett, Robert England under the Norman and Angevin Kings.
CHAPTER 12
1. Larrington, Carolyne Winter is Coming.
2. Martin, George R.R., Garcia, Elio M. Jr., Antonsson, Linda The World of Ice and Fire.
3. https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/10/the-muslim-world-is-more-tolerant-of-homosexuality-than-you-think/.
4. Hourani, Albert A History of the Arab Peoples Quoted in the introduction by Malise Ruthven.
5. https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/4kdvo1/the_thirty_largest_cities_in_europe_by_population/.
6. A juicier description can be found in Fletcher, Richard Moorish Spain.
7. Lewis, David Levering God’s Crucible.
8. http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Long_Bridge.
9. Fletcher, Richard Moorish Spain.
10. Ibid.
11. Fletcher, Richard Moorish Spain.
12. It features in a Game of Thrones tour of Spain. http://www.designmena.com/thoughts/game-of-thrones-themed-tour-of-spains-moorish-architecture-on-offer.
13. Fletcher, Richard Moorish Spain.
14. This was apparently just a literary convention to show how romantic he was, although in Dubai today they can actually bring snow to the desert.
15. Fletcher, Richard Moorish Spain.
16. Lewis, David Levering God’s Crucible.
17. Fletcher, Richard Moorish Spain.
18. The current sword was made for Charles I’s coronation.
19. Fletcher, Richard Moorish Spain.
CHAPTER 13
1. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
2. Seward, Desmond Demon’s Brood.
3. (The term Warden of the March had first been used in 1309, a Clifford being the first.)
4. http://www.proto-english.org/o21.html He also said he ‘felt free to mix armour styles from several different periods.’
5. This was related to the indigenous Gaullish language spoken there before the Romans and now, with French dominance, the region’s Celtic language was being replaced by a Latin one for the second time.
6. As Froissart put it in his Chronicles.
7. Bartlett, Robert The Making of Europe.
8. As described by Gerald of Wales, a chronicler in the 12th century.
9. Reid, Peter A Brief History of Medieval Warfare.
10. Reid, Peter A Brief History of Medieval Warfare.
11. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
12. Mortimer, Ian A Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England.
13. De Charny’s Book of Chivalry.
14. Ibid.
15. Tuchman, Barbara wrote in A Distant Mirror: ‘To fight on horseback or foot wearing 55 pounds of plate armor, to crash in collision with an opponent at full gallop while holding horizontal an eighteen-foot lance half the length of an average telephone pole, to give and receive blows with sword or battle-ax that could cleave a skull or slice off a limb at a stroke, to spend half of life in the saddle through all weathers and for days at a time, was not a weakling’s work.’
16. A Storm of Swords.
17. Keegan, John The Illustrated Face of Battle.
18. A Game of Thrones.
19. Harvey, Joh
n The Plantagenets.
20. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Appleby, John C Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England.
24. Froissart’s Chronicles.
25. Larrington, Carolyne Winter is Coming.
26. Duby, Georges France in the Middle Ages.
27. Bartlett, Robert England under the Norman and Angevin Kings.
28. Poole, A.F. Domesday to Magna Carta.
29. Ackroyd, Peter Foundations.
30. Seward, Desmond The Demon’s Brood.
31. Barker, Juliet England Arise.
32. Tuchman, Barbara A Distant Mirror.
CHAPTER 14
1. A Dance with Dragons.
2. Henry’s Historia Anglorum.
3. This is the traditional theory; another possibility is that these eastern parts of Britain had always been Germanic-speaking - indeed that Boudicca was a sort of Saxon—although there are a number of problems with this idea.
4. Mortimer, Ian Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England.
5. Martin, George R.R., Garcia, Elio M. Jr., Antonsson, Linda The World of Ice and Fire
6. This word was not used at the time, and only appeared much later.
7. http://www.nature.com/news/british-isles-mapped-out-by-genetic-ancestry-1.17136.
8. The degree to which the Angles and Saxons displaced the natives has always been hotly debated.
9. That is at least one theory. It may have been Mercia. Or East Anglia http://csis.pace.edu/grendel/projf20004d/History.html.
10. http://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20140616-game-of-thrones-debt-to-tolkien.
11. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140616-game-of-thrones-debt-to-tolkien.
12. https://twitter.com/ClerkofOxford/status/914396271506575360.
CHAPTER 15
1. http://alxlockwood.webs.com/plaguecomet1347.htm.
2. Although this came about over a confusion with the 1st century outbreak in Rome, which Seneca had so christened).
3. Kelly, John The Great Mortality.
4. Ziegler, Philip The Black Death.
5. Contemporary Gabriel de Mussis, in The Great Dying of the Year of our Lord 1348.
6. Ziegler, Philip The Black Death.
7. Ibid.
8. In the early 20th century the price of tarabagan skins quadrupled and Chinese hunters flooded into Manchuria to catch the rodent, causing an outbreak that killed 60,000 people within a year. The average survival time from onset of symptoms was just 14 hours 30 minutes.
9. Ziegler, Philip The Black Death.