SeanF

That's about five times Better Call Saul.

Again, most ancient writers were quite honest that being a slave was a bad thing. They defended the institution on grounds of necessity, or right of conquest, or as a consequence of sin. They did not claim that it was a “positive good” for the slave.

Yes, there was a lot of Victorian erotic art, such as orientalist paintings. Of course, it was meant to be “edifying” by depicting backward cultures, or the wages of sin, or classical scenes of ravishment.

She flies to Westeros just to say to Jon and the rest "well, it sucks to be you", before flying back to Essos.

So, the sort of stuff you’d see in the National Archeological Museum at Naples?

It's more Imperial Rome than medieval Europe.

All medieval contact sports were brutal. People got killed in football matches, which involved punching, gouging and kicking. . But (unlike some gladiatorial contests, say) the aim was rarely to kill members of the other side. It was incidental to the violence. So was it with tournament fighting.

Yes, tournament fighting certainly had rules. It was dangerous (the melee was usually the most dangerous part ) and people died or suffered broken bones, but killing your opponent was not meant to be the objective. Hacking at horses, or butchering grounded opponents would get you disqualified. There would often be a jury of ladies to determine who had won on points, or to disqualify knights who had fought dishonourably.

As it happens, I disagree. Medieval Europe could be very violent, but it was not mostly so. Judging by homicide rates, it was a lot less violent than modern Latin America or the Caribbean. One can certainly point to precedents for every type of violence in the books, but it's always at the extreme end of what was normal. The warfare in Westeros resembles the Thirty Years War, far more than it does the Wars of the Roses. Chattel slavery is always horrible, but Essossi slavery is at the extreme end of cruelty and waste of human life.

It pretty well torpedoes fan theories that the Targaryens are the villains of the saga.

Gosh, I thought it was coming by out next year. I must get this.

And, paradoxically, as Devereaux argues, the Spartans would have despised them. They would have seen them as boastful, thuggish, extravagant, profligate, selfish, and lacking in true discipline and courage. The ephors annually declared war on the helots. I know of no other group of slavers who were honest enough to admit that slavery means constant war against the slaves.

Overall, I’d say Rome and Macedon succeeded, where Sparta failed, by enrolling the lower classes into their armies, and directing aggression outwards. Sparta’s Army was essentially an army of occupation, to hold down the helots. Then they tried to use it, during and after the Pelopennesian War, to conduct an imperial foreign policy, for which they had nothing like sufficient numbers. They were one defeat away from disaster.

I think that in terms of overall cruelty, and the infliction of misery, the last 150 years of the Roman Republic outdid Sparta by a fair margin.

It’s a while since I read Cartledge, but I never had the impression that he was hostile to Sparta (he didn’t glorify it, either). Sparta sounds pretty horrid, but the same was true for most ancient societies.

It’s the hope that kills.

My understanding is that the imperial government tied people to the land, as colonii adscripti, and imposed hereditary obligations to serve in the army. That's not the same thing as chattel slavery, although it is a state of unfreedom. They tried imposing similar regimentation further up the social ladder, by forcing landowners to serve as town councillors (an expensive obligation) which many of them escaped by joining the Church. Town councils gradually disappeared in the West in the Third and Fourth Centuries, and in the East, in the Sixth and Seventh. Even for the upper classes in the West, life became steadily less good, after 230 or so, with a bit of a recovery in the Fourth Century, but a steep drop after 410. By the late 6th century, the qualification for the Roman Senate was 30 pounds of gold, a laughably small sum to a senator in 200. By way of comparison, that amount of gold would have been worth about £800 in 1400 England. An English earl would enjoy an income of £750 to £3,000 at that point. A fortune of £800 in 1400 England would be the worth of a mid-ranking knight, not a baron, let alone an earl. The Roman upper classes dug their own grave. "Barbarians" usually kept to the terms of the agreements that they made, which were sealed with oaths they did not give lightly. Upper class Romans treated oaths lightly, betrayed each other relentlessly, and bribed the tribes to fight fellow Romans.

In England at least, I think the upper classes wanted to keep serfdom and hold down wages, after 1350, due to labour shortages, but they found it was just impossible. Kate Barker's book on the Peasant's Revolt is very good about this. Landowners were flouting the very laws they were meant to be enforcing, in order to keep their estates viable. Real incomes per head were probably about double the level of 1350 by 1400, a rate of progress that had never been seen before, and would never be seen again until the 19th century. The Peasants' Revolt is a good example of a revolt that took place because things were getting better, rather than worse. More of the peasants were literate, and with more income, they could club together to hire lawyers who would study the charters of manors and abbeys, and challenge labour service and fedual dues that were not actually legal. Interestingly, quite a lot of the lesser gentry also took part in the revolt (Peasants' revolt is a bit of a misnomer) because the magnates were putting the squeeze on them as well. The upper classes were themselves divided between the lords, abbots, and super-rich landowners on the one hand, and the people who owned a single manor, town burgesses, guildsmen etc., who resented those above them as much as the peasants did (the lesser nobility/rising bourgeoisie were exactly the group that would spearhead the French Revolution, hundreds of years later). In the end, sheep-rearing took the place of subsistence farming, in much of England, as it could be done with far fewer people, and generated a good income.

There were some very lengthy sieges of Constantinople, and Nicomedia took six years, before surrendering to the Ottomans, in 1337. But, rather than the modern concept of a siege, with ordered lines surrounding a city, this was more like constant raiding of the hinterland, combined with intermittent attacks on the city. That may have been what took place at Troy.

I wonder why and how being an oarsman on a galley went from being a respectable occupation for the free poor to being a job for enslaved prisoners of war and criminals. It seems self-defeating to me. Galley slaves frequently mutinied, whereas that would be far less of a problem with free men.

I think what Devereaux means is that men and women were rounded up to labour for the army, and in the case of the women, to provide sex. They weren’t bought and sold in medieval Europe. A good example of a typical practice is the one that I cited upthread, of Spanish civilians being forced to construct fortifications for the French.

Army commanders understood that terror frequently worked. Mass rape was a terror tactic, used by the Mongols and Romans, as a means to break resistance; as well as rounding up enemy civilians and driving them up to city walls as human shields. Similarly with the chevauchee, the aim was not just to seize resources, but to demonstrate that the rival government could not protect its subjects, by murdering and raping them, and burning their homes. Commanders frequently could impose restraint (eg Henry V in the Agincourt campaign). Not imposing restraint was often a deliberate choice by those in charge.

It’s a narrow line to walk. How much horror should be depicted, before people decide they can’t stand it? I thought the TV series of Spartacus was very good at depicting how awful Roman slavery was, without making the slavers cartoon villains.

You don't assemble an army of tens of thousands of men in a matter of days. Tywin must have planning for war, for a long time. Bear in mind that the Lannisters are dominant at court, but that dominance is resented by many people, such as Stannis, Renly, and the Tyrells, and Littlefinger has been stirring the pot for a while. Then, you have Arya overhearing Varys and Illyrio discussing the likelihood for war. Tywin has his finger on the pulse, and knows that war is coming. So (given the speed with which they put huge armies into the field) do the lords of the Reach. So, among other things, Tywin was getting his retaliation in first. Yes, the arrest of Tyrion was the spark, but the bonfire had been constructed over many years. Think of it as being like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

“Foraging “ was always a polite term for pillaging. Prior to the invention of railways, which could transport food swiftly, armies survived by foraging or (if in friendly territory) being fed from markets and magazines. Foraging was usually bearable if the locals lived in fertile territory. In an arid country like Spain, Portugal, or Southern Italy, it meant starving the locals, which is one reason why guerilla movements rose against the French, during the Napoleonic wars. Wellington wrote a note on General Whittingham's Memorandum on the War, in April 1813, where he commented upon the French army's ability to live off the land, in ways that other armies could not manage. To what are these facts to be attributed? Certainly not to the inclinations of the inhabitants of the country to the enemy. … but to the system of Terror on which the French and those under their authority invariably act. And here's Sir George Walker, to Lord Liverpool in 1810 a fifth part of the vintage throughout the whole of Rioja has been demanded’ [by the French from the inhabitants], while ‘General Roguet has ordered the road from Ohara to Logrono to be fortified and the inhabitants are by force at work….’ Probably more Spanish died of starvation between 1808-14, than directly at the hands of the French (overall, 10-15% of the Spanish population perished). I’d disagree that murder, rape, and arson were the norm (save when a city had been stormed, in which case, they were routine). They were more like terror tactics, to be deployed against a disobedient population, or heretics, who deserved no mercy. All sides practised terror in the Thirty Years War, for example. Going back to Spain, Kellerman and Suchet had no qualms about deploying murder and rape as terror tactics. Soult, on the other hand, was a lot less brutal. I'd disagree with Devereaux that these were symptoms of an army that was out of control. Sean McGlynn, in By Sword and Fire, Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare, demonstrates that more often than not, these things were ordered by the high command. Sherman’s army was brutal, but rape and murder were not part of his strategy, and were indeed punished by him. One of the many stupidities of later seasons of Game of Thrones, was Sansa's belief that Daenerys' soldiers ought to have brought their own food with them, over more than a thousand miles. What that would have meant in practice is Daenerys' armies pillaging every farm within 50 miles of the route of march and killing anyone who resisted.