madeinmyr:
racefortheironthrone:
Guest Post on Tower of the Hand: Laboratory of Politics, Part IV!
This one took a while to finish, and you’ll see why when you check it out…
Comments and Critiques
Steven Attewell is currently engaged in a series of essays which discuss the great trading metropolises of Essos, with particular focus on the Free Cities. There is a tremendous amount worthwhile analysis in essays, which is all the more impressive given they were written with fairly limited information. We especially like this observation here, which has added considerably to our appreciation of Braavosi politics:
The combination of popular politics and private violence suggests that Braavos is still a fairly aristocratic republic, for all of its belief that the “Braavosi had no kings.” The incumbent, Ferrego Antaryon, is a scion of a well-established family which is often mentioned in comparison to its likely rival, the Prestayns, both of which have “tall square towers” facing each other across the Long Canal, perched right next to “the green copper domes of the Palace of Truth,” as if to make sure the other doesn’t make off with the building when no one’s looking. (AFFC 35: Cat of the Canals) (Steven, The Braavosi Republic)
Really, bravo!
Yet one of the main principles of peer review is the importance of correction and we feel Steven’s essays contain a few very significant errors of fact and interpretation regarding Braavos and Pentos. Concerning Braavos we feel Steven’s portrayal is one sided and misses much of the ambiguity present in that great city of cats and canals which already exercises tremendous influence over Westeros. With Pentos we feel he has simply gotten the economy wrong. We offer our own views and the reasons for them here and welcome any response.
The Darkness under the Braavosi Lamp
Steven’s portrayal of Braavos is extremely positive and generally highlights all the good things about the city in order to heighten the contrast between Braavos and Pentos/Volantis. One might say the city is portrayed as a beautiful lamp, shining brightly across the world, in contrast to the lesser darkness of Pentos and the greater darkness of Volantis:
I believe, and intend to demonstrate in more detail in future installments, that George R. R. Martin has set up Braavos and Volantis as deliberate parallels and counter-weights in Essosi politics - the city of runaway slaves versus the city of slave masters. Whereas Braavos is cosmopolitan, racially egalitarian and makes anti-slavery a key point of foreign policy (to the point where they’re willing to go to war to stop it in neighboring areas), Volantis is a racist slave society mobilizing to put down a rebellion in Old Ghis lest their own slaves get ideas; whereas Braavos looks to the future and feels constantly under construction, much of Volantis is crumbling monuments to past glories; whereas the Old Blood of Volantis live in fear of the oppressed majority who’ve turned to religious radicalism, in Braavos, freedom of speech is a valued right and the poor are free to satirize the rich, who respond not with repression but by joining in on the fun, and there’s much more a sense of social mobility. (Steven, The Constitutions of Essos)
In a sense, then, GRRM is having his cake and eating it too when it comes to this historical parallel - setting up the romantic ideal of the commercial republic and sending it to war against its own darkest impulses. (Steven, The Free Cities And Their Discontents)
This positive portrayal is deserved as far as domestic politics and the slave trade are concerned, but Braavos is not nearly as benign a force in world system as it first appears. Steven has missed the larger story, the steadily increasing and rather sinister power of Braavosi finance capital in the Narrow Sea. There is real darkness there. It all comes down to the Iron Bank. To put it simply, the Iron Bank is evil.
When Queen Cersei defaults on the crown’s obligations to the Iron Bank, the bank cannot initially do anything against the Lannister regime except refuse to loan them any additional coin. So it retaliates against Westeros as a whole by calling in all Westerosi loans in order to starve Westeros of credit:
“[Cersei] has the Faith arming and the Braavosi calling in loans all over Westeros.” (FfC Jaime V)
A group of merchants appeared before her to beg the throne to intercede for them with the Iron Bank of Braavos. The Braavosi were demanding repayment of their outstanding debts, it seemed, and refusing all new loans. (FfC Cersei VIII)
So the Iron Bank is going after the very class of people who regularly make good their commitments, as the bank would obviously not be loaning them money otherwise. These customers have no responsibility for the Iron Throne’s debts. It is not necessary for the bank to do this in order to remain solvent as it’s about to expend considerable coin hiring a sellsword army. So the bank is practicing pure economic warfare, using mass financial sanctions to hit the Lannister regime where it hurts.
Now consider how much power the Iron Bank has to possess over the Westerosi economy in order to be able to do this. Westeros as a whole has clearly been directly and indirectly dependent upon the Iron Bank for credit for quite some time. The Iron Bank is exploiting this dependency in the most destructive way possible. Consider what most of these late Fall loans would probably be for. Merchants and lords are seeking to borrow money for the same reason Jon Snow takes out a loan from the Iron Bank: to pay for the damage of the recent wars and refugee crisis’s and import food and materials in belated preparation for the upcoming Winter. By engineering a credit crisis at this crucial moment the Iron Bank has stopped numerous repairs, preparations and precautions from being made (except for the Nights Watch, as Jon Snow sensibly exploits his position as defacto gatekeeper to the King to get a decent loan for his order). So, all of the Iron Banks Westerosi customers are collectively punished for the incompetence and bad faith of the Queen-Regent whilst many of the common people are systematically threatened with hardship and starvation. At the same time the Iron Bank strives to revive the civil war by buying King Stannis a new mercenary army in exchange for additional, no doubt very lucrative promises (“You are a worse pirate then Salladhor Saan!”). Although the odious Lannister Regime is seriously destabilized, the worst suffering will be borne by average people who have absolutely nothing to do with King Robert and the usurper Joffrey’s debts.
While the Iron Bank’s professionalism and iron devotion to the interests of their shareholders and depositors is somewhat admirable, we think plunging an entire continent into famine, misery and renewed civil war to insure the repayment with interest of some at-risk loans is sociopathic. As plans go the Iron Bank’s is disturbingly similar to Littlefinger’s efforts to engineer chaos and then profit from it. Of course Lord Baelish began his career in the customs house of Gulltown, which is the closest Westerosi port to Braavos. Baelish had to learn how to engineer his incomprehensibly complex (for Westerosi) financial dealings from somewhere and Braavos, or Braavosi merchants/moneylenders in Gulltown, seem the likeliest teachers. Baelish also has distant Braavosi ancestry, decided “Alayne Stone” would be half-Braavosi (indicating it would be very believable for him to have a Braavosi lover), and borrowed a lot of money from the Iron Bank as Master of Coin. It might be profitable to think of Littlefinger less as an independent actor and more as an unconscious agent of Braavosi finance capital, a little man who advances in part by emulating the Braavosi and through this emulation bringing them further into Westeros.
When it comes to Westeros there doesn’t seem to be any real moral difference between Braavos and Pentos. By the end of A Feast for Crows the leading figures of Pentos and Braavos are both using their economic power to pursue the exploitation of the Seven Kingdoms. Magister Illyrio and Varys’ conspiracy has internally destabilized the Lannister Regime through manipulation and assassination and is backing a mercenary invasion in support of the pretender “Aegon”. The Iron Bank has destabilized the Lannister Regime by engineering a financial crisis and is preparing to fund an invasion by various mercenary companies in support of King Stannis. Both will get a lot of people killed and further weaken a country on the verge of complete collapse.
Furthermore, of the two parties, the Iron Bank is the more menacing. Magister Illyrio has immense wealth and a vast commercial, human trafficking, and information network stretching from the Narrow Sea to Qarth, but at the end of the day he is only one man and his private empire nothing more than a series of personal and mercenary alliances. His goals are purely personal, whatever they are, and his network will not survive his death. The Iron Bank in contrast is probably the single largest and most powerful private institution on the planet. Its servants are not allies, slaves, or mercenaries but employees, its leadership is a faceless corporate board, and its overriding goal, like that of any corporation, is the maximization of profit for the benefit of its investors and depositors so that it might become even bigger and more powerful. When a member of the board dies, he will be replaced, the same as any other servant, while the bank will go on. Magister Illyrio is merely a figure of the present; the Iron Bank is the organization of the future. This bodes rather ill for Westeros in the long run unless they can find a way to counter the Bank’s influence. In this respect there is greater darkness in Braavos then in Pentos.
Braavosi opposition to the slave trade, which manifests itself in such humanitarian state actions as the Pentosi treaty and the rescue of the Hardhome wildlings from the Lyseni slavers, does not seem to have nurtured any empathy for the suffering inflicted on foreign peoples by the machinations of their most powerful corporation (WoW Mercy). This is one hell of a moral blind spot, though one we First World citizens should be quite familiar with.
Steven also highlights the social solidarity that exists in Braavos, which he credits to the city’s relatively progressive folkways and political cutlure:
This confidence in the upper classes that their position can survive the satire of the playwright and the mockery of the pit speaks to a robust national identity, to say nothing of a level of social mobility almost unthinkable in Westeros. Across the narrow sea, society may be divided between highborn and smallfolk, but the Braavosi still remember that “we are a mongrel folk, the sons of slaves and whores and thieves. Our forebears came from half a hundred lands to this place of refuge, to escape the dragonlords who enslaved them.” (AFFC 35: Cat of the Canals) (Steven, The Braavosi Republic)
No wonder then that, in Pentos, wealth rules unrestricted by any checks and balances. In Braavos at least, the memory of slavery inhibits the exploitation of the poor by the rich from reaching its logical maximum; and, if historical precedent holds, the Sealord and the Braavosi government provide a tempering influence on the merchant classes. (Steven, The Free Cities And Their Discontents)
Braavos is indeed a confident city, overflowing with bravado and very little class tension. But this relatively peaceful accord between the classes is underwritten by real fear, a fear that Steven completely misses. Should any Braavosi forget their common ancestry and the civic obligations that it entails they risk being cut down by Braavos’s older sibling, the Faceless Men. Every member of the Braavosi aristocracy and bourgeoisie has a sword hanging over their heads, one that could fall if they do anything that makes someone so angry and desperate that they are willing to go to the House of Black and White and pay whatever extreme price is required. The legacy of slavery “inhibits the exploitation of the poor by the rich from reaching its logical maximum” in more than one way.
We see what can happen to those who cheat the unfortunate in the figure of the soup shop insurance salesman who does business in the Purple Harbor:
The old man was some sort of merchant, Cat concluded after watching him for a few days. His trade had to do with the sea, though she never saw him set foot upon a ship. He spent his days sitting in a soup shop near the Purple Harbor, a cup of onion broth cooling at his elbow as he shuffled papers and sealing wax and spoke in sharp tones to a parade of captains, shipowners, and other merchants, none of whom seemed to like him very much.
Yet they brought him money: leather purses plump with gold and silver and the square iron coins of Braavos. The old man would count it out carefully, sorting the coins and stacking them up neatly, like with like. He never looked at the coins. Instead he bit them, always on the left side of his mouth, where he still had all his teeth. From time to time he’d spin one on the table and listen to the sound it made when it came clattering to a stop.
And when all the coins had been counted and tasted, the old man would scrawl upon a parchment, stamp it with his seal, and give it to the captain. Else he’d shake his head and shove the coins back across the table. Whenever he did that, the other man would get red-faced and angry, or pale and scared-looking.
Cat did not understand. “They pay him gold and silver, but he only gives them writing. Are they stupid?”
“A few, mayhaps. Most are simply cautious. Some think to cozen him. He is not a man easily cozened, however.”
“But what is he selling them?”
“He is writing each a binder. If their ships are lost in a storm or taken by pirates, he promises to pay them for the value of the vessel and all its contents.”
“Is it some kind of wager?”
“Of a sort. A wager every captain hopes to lose.”
“Yes, but if they win …”
“… they lose their ships, oftimes their very lives. The seas are dangerous, and never more so than in autumn. No doubt many a captain sinking in a storm has taken some small solace in his binder back in Braavos, knowing that his widow and children will not want.” A sad smile touched his lips. “It is one thing to write such a binder, though, and another to make good on it.”
Cat understood. One of them must hate him. One of them came to the House of Black and White and prayed for the god to take him. She wondered who it had been, but the kindly man would not tell her. (DwD, The Ugly Little Girl)
Ken Mondschein’s interpretation in Down and Out in Westeros is that this smalltime insurance salesman was dishonestly increasing his profit margin by only accepting heavy (high value) currency as payment and then compensating claimants with light (debased) currency (very likely recently re-minted Westerosi dragons). One of his victims does not accept this lying down and goes to the Faceless Men to receive satisfaction. The soup shop’s clients/victims were fellow members of the bourgeoisie rather than the poor, but to cheat a widow is a very low thing to do and a major violation of his obligations, just the sort of thing that might make someone extremely furious (the widow, a relative, a friend, an outraged observer…). Now there are several possible explanations for why the insurance salesman was doing this. It might be he was simply a greedy, lowdown man (lots of people don’t like him!). Another possibility is that he was experiencing temporary financial pressure and had to cheat some of his customers to stay above water. But there are hints that his cheating could have actually been retaliatory. Arya observes, and the Kindly Man confirms, how many of the captains try to “cozen” the salesman when negotiating their binders. Maybe the salesman came to suspect he’d been cheated after committing himself to a contract he was legally bound to honor. In this case, his paying back in debased coinage would have been literal payback. A desperate and grief stricken widow is not going to be very understanding, however.
Both Pentos and Braavos depend upon violence to maintain their respective societies. In Pentos the dominance of the wealthy elite is assured by the ritual sacrifice of one of their members. This collective sacrifice absolves the upper class as a whole of any blame. In Braavos a holy order of resolutely neutral assassins is allowed to exist openly within the city boundaries and offer up their services to anyone who is desperate enough to meet their price. In this way those who exploit, disrupt, and cheat the body politic, and thus threaten the solidarity of the city, can be safely removed. The position of the Braavosi elite is secure because of this fearful accountability.
The Spice and Textile Trades
We believe Steven has made an error as to the composition of the Pentosi economy. He writes that the Pentosi economy depends upon the trade in spices:
But in Pentos, the vast wealth of the spice trade (Pentos’ economic specialty)… (Steven, The Free Cities And Their Discontents)
You might be confusing Magister Illyrio’s specialty (spices, gems, exotica, and slaves) with Pentos as a whole. The spice trade is no more a Pentosi specialty then it is a Braavosi specialty. Pentosi and Braavosi trade ships both regularly traverse the Jade Sea traders circle. True, Pentos is well positioned concerning the overland route between Norvos, Qohor and Vaes Dothrak (hence Illyrio’s involvement with caravans and the Dothraki), but the purple sails of the Braavosi are far more renowned. When Prince Quentyn is in Volantis trying to find a ship to Slavers Bay it is the Braavosi that his companion Gerris suggests, for “One hears of purple sails as far away as Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea” (DwD Quentyn I). Given the extraordinary amounts of capital possessed by Braavosi moneylenders and the Iron Bank, the Braavosi appear to be doing better than the Pentosi overall. And yet, when it comes to the spice trade one must understand that Braavos itself is but a secondary player.
The only Free City that can actually be said to specialize in the spice trade is Old Volantis. This is due to the direct economic relationship that exists between Volantis and the world city of Qarth. While staying in Volantis Prince Quentyn spies “Qartheen spicers big as palaces” in the harbor and “pale-skinned voyagers from Qarth” in the Merchant House (DwD Quentyn I). The Qartheen spice traders do not appear to regularly traverse the Narrow Sea (there are no mentions of them anywhere except Volantis, Slavers Bay, and Vaes Dothrak), so Volantis is the natural place to unload or transfer their wares. The Qartheen ships are huge and specialize in volume, hence Volantis is always rolling in spices, far more than Pentos could ever get by caravan and their much smaller ships (which also traverse much greater distances and have to go through the dangerous Stepstones).
If the Pentosi specialize in anything it is their dyes. Pentosi dyes are in high demand in the East as they’re one of the goods being negotiated in Vaes Dothrak’s Western Bazaar:
Across the aisle, a fat cloth trader from Yi Ti was haggling with a Pentoshi over the price of some green dye, the monkey tail on his hat swaying back and forth as he shook his head. (GoT Dany VI)
The production of dye is indicative of the existence of a modest textile industry, as one naturally goes with the other. Pentos is also a fairly large and wealthy city (larger, apparently, then Myr); obviously there are various homegrown industries that employ this vast urban proletariat. Each of the Free Cites seems to have a significant textile industry, with Myr merely the leading city in production, quality, and branding. There are brief mentions of Lyseni and Volantene lace as well as fabrics that are produced by the Free Cities in general:
Magister Illyrio murmured a command, and four burly slaves hurried forward, bearing between them a great cedar chest bound in bronze. When she opened it, she found piles of the finest velvets and damasks the Free Cities could produce… and resting on top, nestled in the soft cloth, three huge eggs. (GoT Dany II)
We speculate that a lot of Tyroshi and Pentosi dye actually goes to Myr. Having two dye suppliers, one to the north and another to the south, means that neither Pentos nor Tyrosh have a monopoly that can negatively impact Myrish production.