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Military Strengths-2 and More!


Corvo the Crow

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2 minutes ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Where do we get the bolded part? North makes up a half or a third of the realm, this would make Vale 1/9 of the realm at least. Not possible.

 

I might have included the marshes of the Neck in my statement which is a very unfertile land and impossible to grow crops in. But still the neck is half the size of the Vale, and if you add Flint's finger and cape Kraken you have a kingdom the size of the Vale of Arryn. After that split the white knife in two and there you go, you have two other kingdoms the size of the Vale of Arryn, with the western part of the white knife being at least a third bigger than the Vale. 

 

12 minutes ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Also no one save some bedouins breeding arab horses live in deserts of Dorne. The populations are centered around the fertile areas around such as rivers or Yronwood’s lands and the coasts.

4

I was going to say previously that most of the population likely lives off the land around the coast and near rivers, which is why Dorne has the smallest population of the kingdoms (forget the Iron islands, they are a nuisance). Much Like Australia 

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8 minutes ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Exactly.

One thing worth noting is the North’s high proportion of heavy cavalry we see with Robb despite the region being poorer; I believe with what we see in F&B you’d agree at last when I say again(as I have been saying for a year or two now) that the norm is 1 in 10 being heavy cavalry( total cavalry proportion would be higher). 

Bringing in a higher proportion of heavy cavalry but with a lower overall number of men than you could raise in total makes it a more cost effective army for the North; they still pack the same punch with heavy cavalry numbers staying the same but have fewer idle mouths to feed on the long march south and let’s face it, these men, be it knight or men-at-arms, are just mouths with feet for thousands of miles until they finally reach the battlefield or at least warzone.

I have never considered that. You may be right, although I don’t know if horses eat more than humans, which might invalidate that theory.

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12 minutes ago, The Young Maester said:

The Riverlands even tho is always plagued by war, are still highly populated and are most likely the 2nd most populated of the kingdoms since it's not just a battleground for warfare, but also a centre of trade between 4-5 kingdoms. Not to the forget its fertile lands which are no doubt due to attract many foreign farmers from maybe the Westerlands into migrating. 

The Riverlands united under a strong leader can be a force to be reckoned with. If the North and Riverlands managed to part away from the Iron Throne, with some years of recovery they could have easily raised a force that could challenge the might of Renly's host. 

 

Overall, the North is not the fertile farmland that Reach or RL are, or the small strip of land called Vale of Arryn which is the most fertile, but North has some very good land even as far as the wall and again, Vale or RL or even the Reach is NOT A THIRD OF THE NORTH.

North is somewhere between a third and a half of the realm, Reach being a third may make some slight sense if the North is a third of the realm and even that is a stretch.

 

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2 minutes ago, Corvo the Crow said:

 

Overall, the North is not the fertile farmland that Reach or RL are, or the small strip of land called Vale of Arryn which is the most fertile, but North has some very good land even as far as the wall and again, Vale or RL or even the Reach is NOT A THIRD OF THE NORTH.

North is somewhere between a third and a half of the realm, Reach being a third may make some slight sense if the North is a third of the realm and even that is a stretch.

 

The North is so big that I am pretty sure that some parts of it most have some lands that are somewhat fertile. The North those have a lot of lands covered with mountains and forests, however in contrast to this, they should have a lot of empty grasslands that should have no trouble for farming during the summer, enough lands to rival the production rate of the Riverlands. 

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16 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

I have never considered that. You may be right, although I don’t know if horses eat more than humans, which might invalidate that theory.

Doesn’t need to; You have to bring in your horse either way. You may go traditional and bring 45000 men-at-arms, light horse and sellswords and freeriders(North is lacking in the latter two but not the first two) along with your 5000 horse and wreak havoc on the field of battle but face the problem of feeding them along the way and also feeding them on the road back, a problem Cregan faced the same problem as well, or go conservative and bring 15000 others along with the 5000 others. Not only you still have the same amount of wrecking balls but also fewer mouths to feed and perhaps even more men that is left farming, if these men are drawn from farmers, which I think now is a possibility. Not untrained ones but small land owners with training and equipment or even militias that train semi-regularly.

Now also think of this scenario; Robb decides 50000 army is impossible to feed so goes with 20000 but decides 1 knight in 4 is too expensive still and goes traditional, do you think he’d still have the same effectiveness?

This 1 in 10 is for the average lords, we see that both Tywin and Hightowers have higher with tywin having  1 in 7 (500 knights 3000 men at arms) and Hightowers 1 in 6 (1000 knights and 5000 men-at-arms) and some lords obviously even worse than this since great southron host with over 20000 had less than 1 in 10. For the sake of argument assume it’s 25000 and 1 in 10, Hightowers already brought 1000 of that 2500 knights and 5000 of the other 22500, it leaves 1500 knights among 19000 men, a ratio of 1 in 13 or so.

 

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12 minutes ago, Corvo the Crow said:

 

Overall, the North is not the fertile farmland that Reach or RL are, or the small strip of land called Vale of Arryn which is the most fertile, but North has some very good land even as far as the wall and again, Vale or RL or even the Reach is NOT A THIRD OF THE NORTH.

North is somewhere between a third and a half of the realm, Reach being a third may make some slight sense if the North is a third of the realm and even that is a stretch.

 

Elio calculated it exactly some time ago, using pixel counting software on the official map. The current North covers just over 36% of Westeros's surface area. And the real North (before the theft of the New Gift) covers about 38%.

More useful is comparing comparative square miles of surface area of the various kingdoms. I don't recall the exact figures on this, however, roughly speaking, the current North covers around 900k square miles. Dorne, for example, seems to cover around 200k square miles by a rough estimation. That puts the North at more than 4 times Dorne's surface area.

However, would it be an exaggeration to say that 90% of Dorne is covered by desert? Leaving precious little arable farmland. By contrast, the North can be farmed right up to the Wall. So if the North has 4 times Dorne's surface area, and even if just a quarter of it is farmable, it easily has 10-15 times the farmland that Dorne has.

Even at a much lower yield per hectare, the North clearly produces multiple times Dorne's agricultural output.

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1 minute ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Elio calculated it exactly some time ago, using pixel counting software on the official map. The current North covers just over 36% of Westeros's surface area. And the real North (before the theft of the New Gift) covers about 38%.

More useful is comparing comparative square miles of surface area of the various kingdoms. I don't recall the exact figures on this, however, roughly speaking, the current North covers around 900k square miles. Dorne, for example, seems to cover around 200k square miles by a rough estimation. That puts the North at more than 4 times Dorne's surface area.

However, would it be an exaggeration to say that 90% of Dorne is covered by desert? Leaving precious little arable farmland. By contrast, the North can be farmed right up to the Wall. So if the North has 4 times Dorne's surface area, and even if just a quarter of it is farmable, it easily has 10-15 times the farmland that Dorne has.

Even at a much lower yield per hectare, the North clearly produces multiple times Dorne's agricultural output.

But is official map to scale? Remember it’s supposed to be “here be dragons” kind of medieval inaccuracy, GRRM said.

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4 minutes ago, Corvo the Crow said:

But is official map to scale? Remember it’s supposed to be “here be dragons” kind of medieval inaccuracy, GRRM said.

Sure. To that I cannot speak. Other than saying George himself suggested we use the Wall as a measuring stick (albeit a rough one).

We do see that the length of the Wall (300 miles) matches exactly the straight line distance between Deepwood Motte and Winterfell, which Stannis states to also be 300 miles. So there seems to be internal consistency to that level, at least.

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1 hour ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

I have never considered that. You may be right, although I don’t know if horses eat more than humans, which might invalidate that theory.

By sheer weight, they eat far more. Horses are 1000-1500 lbs and humans riding them to war will be 150-200. If they do not have oats / grains to eat whilst resting, they have to graze for several hours a day to get their nourishment. This was the Mongols great advantage since their horses could forage during the winter and were generally smaller. 

I'd have to go and dig up some books to get actual numbers but horses need a lot more than humans.

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The official map is George's map, the one he uses to calculate distances and movements. Some authors might well create inaccurately-scaled maps for realism's sake, perhaps (though to be honest I'm not aware of any), but in this case the map is fairly accurate to the distances George intends.

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40 minutes ago, Ran said:

The official map is George's map, the one he uses to calculate distances and movements. Some authors might well create inaccurately-scaled maps for realism's sake, perhaps (though to be honest I'm not aware of any), but in this case the map is fairly accurate to the distances George intends.

Btw, I’d like to ask; what is the official map? The one inside the cover of every novel? The one in World of Ice and Fire or Lands of Ice and Fire? 

Or are these all to same scale?

 

Oh! And a direction to the thread/video where you calculated the map, pretty please?:)

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Werthead does a pretty good job with overall size estimates for Westeros, and placing the North at a reasonable latitude. Here is the link.

https://atlasoficeandfireblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/the-size-and-extent-of-westeros/

I would argue that he still puts the Wall a few degrees too far North (his estimate works out to around 62 degrees North, while I think it is closer to 58 degrees North, with the edge of the Haunted Forest marking the Arctic circle.)

But even using Werthead's scale, that places Winterfell at around 55 degrees North. That is the same latitude as Moscow. And incidentally, places Moat Cailin at around 49 degrees North, which is approximately the latitude of Paris. So the entire area between Moat Cailin and Winterfell would essentially fall south of Scandinavia, and instead be equivalent to the Northern parts of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Kievan Rus, etc.

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1 hour ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Btw, I’d like to ask; what is the official map? The one inside the cover of every novel? The one in World of Ice and Fire or Lands of Ice and Fire? 

Or are these all to same scale?

They are all roughly to the same scale, variations between artists aside.

The "official map", such as it is, is George's hand-drawn maps of Westeros, Essos, etc. which are the basis of all the published maps. Whether George has moved to using the LoIaF posters for his measuring of distances or not, for the convenience of having such a large map, I do not know.

1 hour ago, Corvo the Crow said:

 

Oh! And a direction to the thread/video where you calculated the map, pretty please?:)

Long gone to the dust of history, I fear. It was done using histograms, though, which are available in most more advanced graphics programs. Once you have a good, clean image of Westeros, you can fill it in with a color and use a histogram to get the exact pixel count of those colors. Figure out how many pixels to the square mile/kilometer and you can get a pretty exact figure for its area.

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10 hours ago, The Young Maester said:

Imagine raising an army from a kingdom the size of the USA, during mid/late medieval society. With a population that is scattered throughout the countryside due to the lack of cities and towns. Imagine sending your riders to find any available men, how hard could it be to be able to knick pick every available men throughout the land especially when every major lord of the North holds lands that are equal in size with France. Imagine how hard it is to find these men with the lack of roads and infrastructure, along with all the mountains, forests, and wilderness of the North.

We see how quickly Stannis raises the clansmen - exactly the number of men Jon Snow promised him to find there. In a region which is devoid of any settlements even on Westerosi maps - which should be more detailed than those we have. We also have no reason to believe the lords of the North don't keep tabs on their smallfolk. The lords collect their taxes and rents, and they are able to store provisions for winter based on the real population of the North - and not on some imaginary number. Else the first years-long winter should have killed all the Northmen.

All that implies the lords up there how many smallfolk they have and how many men they can collect from their lands. Else there wouldn't even be a proper kingdom up there.

In fact, statistics on population and food production should be very good indeed. Much better than any such numbers in the real middle ages.

9 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

One point I’d like to correct; North is not bereft of towns; Barrowton (and Wintertown in Winter) are just the most prominent one and perhaps the only large one but we’ve been told there are other ones.

For all the other kingdoms we do hear about market towns and the like - but not the North. There is no reason to assume there are any market towns up there aside from Barrowton.

9 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Similar case, Cat tells us there are many a market town on Greenfork but we don’t know any of them because none are as prominent as say Saltpans or Seagard or Fairmarket.

No, not a similar case. For the Riverlands we have confirmed market towns. For the North this isn't confirmed.

Would you also say there must be vast swamps, windswept plains, mountains, etc. in the Riverlands just because we have those confirmed for the North?

I don't think so.

9 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

But this is not what I came to post...

Lannisters start ‘to dance’ with 8000 men and after defeating the smaller army of Vance and Piper on Redfork (it seems history repeats itself), they cross it and some time later they are done in Fishfeed. Fishfeed was the bloodiest battle with 2000 dead in total, so how come Westerman army just ceased to exist? Were they already reduced to a small number at this time? Did they just surrender after some fighting?

There were multiple battles involving Riverlanders and Westermen - one assumes Lord Jason suffered considerable losses at the Red Fork and his successors later may have suffered many desertions. Marbrand and Lefford are not Lannisters of Casterly Rock. Their authority wouldn't have been the same as Lord Jason's. And once the news about the Ironborn attacks reached them one assumes a significant number of men said 'Well, fuck the king. We are going back home to see to defense of our families!'

9 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Also one thing I’d like to point out, Rivermen numbers in dance exceed the Westerman numbers. I believe this would also be the case if Edmure had more time to prepare and had not spread his forces thin.

Edmure's and Robb's problem was that the Riverlords never formed a united army they could lead against Tywin. Early in ACoK Edmure is blamed for allowing them to go home, but chances are that his 'permission' was just a formality. The Riverlords do what they want, not what the son of their lord or some king commands them.

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On 12/31/2018 at 2:13 PM, Ran said:

They are all roughly to the same scale, variations between artists aside.

The "official map", such as it is, is George's hand-drawn maps of Westeros, Essos, etc. which are the basis of all the published maps. Whether George has moved to using the LoIaF posters for his measuring of distances or not, for the convenience of having such a large map, I do not know

Wasn’t Mr. Martin’s stance on it medieval vagueness though? Or was it just for the information on World Book?

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Anyone willing to help compile a list of lords and landed knights in the Great Hightower host? 

May later try to assign numbers on these lords.

Ormund forces anyone who bends the knee to join to him and from his first battle, two Alans, Tarly and Beesbury is captured and Owen Costayne is also “captured”

Bastard of Bitterbridge dies but Rowan who was with him takes the remnants of his host North, this may include bitterbridge men as well since they  later join the blacks again in Tumbleton and Ulf is given the title lord of bitterbridge.

 

We also know the caltrops;

Lord Unwin Peake 

Ser Hobert Hightower

Ser Tyler Norcross

Marq Ambrose

Richard Rodden

Ser Jon Roxton

Lord Owen Fossoway

Ser Victor Risley

Lord George Graceford

Lord Owain Bourney

Ser Lucas Leygood’s father

and two others I can’t find

Norcrosses are bannermen to Florents so they were likely part of this army as well, whether willingly or through defeat, though likely willing since Norcross is trusted to be part of caltrops.

Also, Stannis says Florents have two thousand men but we see them having perhaps a thousand horses or even more (more than half of the 1300-1500 on dragonstone and men lost in the van) this extraordinarily high horse to foot ratio may not be what it seems and Stannis may just be reciting an older, well documented number with Florents having more men now.

 

Some numbers; 

- Hightower set out with 1000 knights, 5000 men-at-arms and unknown number of rabble and sellswords.

- Peake had 100 knights and 900 men-at-arms. Also 500 sellswords when he became regent, these must have been part of the Original army that left Oldtown.

During Vulture hunt, Tarlys, Along with Caron and Dondarrion, had rougly 7500; half the number of Vulture king, which was half of his original 30000 divided equally, all would have ~2500. During another vulture hunt, Caron and Dondarrion have 4000 men and 800 knights which seems to support this.

 

 

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@Corvo the Crow

Maybe the Hightower host included the Rowans, Oakhearts, and Grimms? Daeron and Ormund are mentioned to have enforced the submission of all three but those "victories" are given no details so...

EDIT: And maybe the Merryweathers given the Greens' successful siege of Longtable?

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2 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Wasn’t Mr. Martin’s stance on it medieval vagueness though? Or was it just for the information on World Book?

The Westeros and near Essos map is certainly accurate. George speaks of the contents of the World Book regarding the far eastern places at the edge of Westerosi knowledge as being "here be dragons" sort of territory, so in theory his map in that area could be wildly wrong (especially in the interior of Essos, away from the sea) ... but I wouldn't bet on it. On the other hand, the information that goes along with the maps -- the precise placement of cities, the descriptions of the peoples, etc., sure, that could be more off in TWoIaF.

 

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50 minutes ago, The Grey Wolf said:

@Corvo the Crow

Maybe the Hightower host included the Rowans, Oakhearts, and Grimms? Daeron and Ormund are mentioned to have enforced the submission of all three but those "victories" are given no details so...

EDIT: And maybe the Merryweathers given the Greens' successful siege of Longtable?

No not the Rowans, Thaddeus retreated with his surviving forces or was there a second battle?

Men were coming to tumbleton in yheir thousands from “Bitterbridge, longtable and further south”

 

Didn’t peake kill him after the caltrops? Means 3 others if not so.

 

Also nice pointing out, Rowan and Oakheart were “sieging” the Oldtown during the faith uprising but how many did they have?

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