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The Vale and European Medieval History


Michael Snyder

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GRRM made a large leap in creating the Knights of the Vale. Every mountainous region of Europe has produced good, even exceptional infantry during the Middle Ages. The Swiss produced the pike and halberd formations that crushed the Hapsburgs and ended Charles the Bold's dreams of empire. The Catalans, light infantry armed with javelins, comprising the Great Company, not only terrorized northern Italy, they conquered and held parts of Greece from the Normans who had taken them from the Eastern Roman Empire. The Highlanders gained fame from the 17th century for their wild charges. But horsemen? Such regions sometimes produced light cavalry mounted on large ponies like the Albanian "stradiots", but not heavy armored men-at-arms. Horses require large amounts of grass and fodder, space for exercise, breeding and training and a great deal of economic investment, things the peoples of these valleys and mountains did not have. I could see Dorne producing excellent light cavalry mounted on horses similar to Arabs, the famed Spanish "jinettes". I could see the Reach producing heavy cavalry like southern France and northern Italy, the Westerlands and the Crown Lands producing men-at-arms similar to Germans and the River Lands producing men-at-arms like the English, but a mountainous area like the Vale producing "knights", sorry just can't see that. 

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It's the Vale of Arryn, not the Mountains of Arryn, for a reason. The Lombards in the Po Valley -- which sits between the Alps and Apennines -- had some notable companies of knights, such as the Company of Death reputedly at the Battle of Legnano, to take one example that comes to mind. There were Swiss knights, Bavarian knights, Austrian knights...

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