by Ed West
Across the river Thames, Southwark was famed for its very strong beer made from brownish Thames water, but also for its large numbers of brothels—“stews”—most of them, strangely, owned by the Bishop of Winchester. Many of the women were Flemish, relatively exotic migrants from across the sea, working in Cock Lane and Gropecuntlane, among the many colorful street names in the city (there was also a Shitbrook Street and Pissing Alley). Londoners in trouble with the authorities could always run off to Southwark and because it was a separate jurisdiction, they often escaped justice; later this seedy underbelly would become host to the city’s most famous playhouse, William Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
Even a century earlier the city was home to over 350 ale houses, taverns, and inns, notorious dens of vice and crime. Across the sea in Flanders, beer was already made with hops, but it was not until the Hundred Years’ War that Englishmen would first taste this drink, recognizable to modern palates as beer. The “beer” consumed at that time would have had a texture more like porridge, muddy and foggy, although it had its enthusiasts and lasted well into the Tudor period. A later poet described his love of the native ale:
Ich I am a Cornish man, and ale I can brew
It will make one to cacke also to spew
It is thick and smokey and also it is thin
It is like wash of pigs had wrestled therein26
Like with all significant towns in the fourteenth century, London’s citizens could entertain themselves with plays, although before the first theaters they would have been done by travelling amateurs on major feast days. These performances were very bawdy, featuring sex, sadism, rape, nudity, drunkenness, and torture (with entrails from local butchers as props). But the violence on stage reflected the violence off it, with murder rates comparable to modern central America.27 At night, the bell in the church of St Mary-le-Bow would sound the start of nightfall, and while this was no longer the signal for the curfew, as it had been in William the Conqueror’s day, men and women were wise to head indoors.
HERE BE DRAGONS
London’s dominance of Britain was due to its position on the Thames, giving its large class of merchants—considerable even in Roman times—access to the markets of Europe’s richest regions: Flanders, France, the Rhineland, and northern Italy. This interconnected economy, once abysmally poorer and more primitive than the East, had begun to catch up and even surge ahead economically; already Flanders and Holland showed signs of the economic advances that would later lead to the seventeenth century Dutch invention of modern capitalism. This Catholic Christian world would have been familiar to educated Englishmen, but beyond that it would be a matter of “here be dragons.” (The phrase is not a myth, for there are indeed two recorded incidents of maps bearing the Latin phrase HC SVNT DRACONS, “here are dragons,” both from the 1500s.)
Martin’s world is composed of four known continents: Westeros, Essos, Sothoryos, and Ulthos, the latter two of which we’ve heard little of in the first books, although Sothoryos is supposedly filled with steaming jungles and tropical diseases and is presumably a bit like Africa. Between Westeros and Essos lies the Narrow Sea, on the other side of which are a group of city-states called the Free Cities, and to the south and east of them fallen civilizations as well as nomadic peoples such as the Dothraki, who cross the vast expanses of the continent on horse, occasionally terrorizing and enslaving the continent’s cities, and sometimes trading with them instead.
Westeros is nine hundred miles long, with a wide range of climates and peoples: the southernmost kingdom, Dorne, is Mediterranean-like, warm and dusty and filled with “scorpions and sand,” and noted for its hot-blooded people who hail from various, racially-diverse invaders. The North is snowbound, even in summer, while beyond the wall the climate is arctic. The Realm itself covers only the southern portion of the island, and is protected by a three hundred-mile wall, beyond which are the Free Folk, or wildlings, descendants of the original inhabitants of the island, as well as other less savory and more fantastical beings. At the very far north is the Land of Always Winter, from where the feared White Walkers are supposed to hail, although the existence of these ghost-like creatures is disputed by many.
To Western Europeans at the time, just as in Martin’s fantasy, there was the known world, of Europe and the near East, and the unknown world beyond. Distant lands such as Persia and India were, in historian Barbara Tuchman’s words,
seen through a gauze of fabulous fairy tales revealing an occasional nugget of reality: forests so high they touch the clouds, horned pygmies who move in herds and grow old in seven years, brahmins who burn themselves on funeral pyres, men with dogs’ heads and six toes, ‘cyclopeans’ with only one eye and one foot who move as fast as the wind, the ‘monoceros’ which can be caught only when it sleeps in the lap of a virgin, Amazons whose tears are of silver, panthers who practice the caesarean operation with their own claws, trees whose leaves supply wool, snakes 300ft long, snakes with precious stones for eyes, snakes who so love music that for prudence they stop up one ear with their tail.28
Most people in the realm of England would never have met anyone from these far-off lands, although some might have seen their exotic exports, of silk, gold, and ivory, among other things. Even further away than Persia or India, as far as the world reached, Western European maps at the time feature “Seres,” a land so-called because its people wear silk, a precious material grown by worms, which these Eastern people had tried to prevent foreigners from acquiring (until a monk sneaked a pair of silk worms to Byzantium). Yet little was known of this Seres, “China,” or the rumors that a sophisticated island-kingdom lay even beyond it.
People thought India covered half the world, while others believed that there were three Indias, one ruled by Prester John: a legendary central Asian king Europeans believed would help them win the Crusades. Letters supposedly from the magnificent ruler circulated in the twelfth century stating, “I, Prester John, am the lord of lords, and I surpass all the kings of the entire world in wealth, virtue and power . . . Milk and honey flow freely in our lands; poison can do no harm, nor do any noisy frogs croak. There are no scorpions, no serpents creeping in the grass.”29 This exotic faraway kingdom was filled with diamonds, emeralds, and other precious stones, as well as peppers and elixirs that would cure all sorts of ailments.
Men dreamed of huge and unfeasible wealth in the East: “gem-bearing trees and mountains of gold” guarded by snakes and Ophir, a land filled with “giants, pigmies, dog-headed men, a river that flowed to Paradise, precious stones, a fountain of youth, a sea of sand, a river of stones, beyond which lived the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, also tributary to Prester John.”30 There were other magical lands—“Atlantis, El Dorado, Rio Doro, the River of Gold, the Empire of Monomotopa, Island of the Seven Cities of Cibola, discovered by seven bishops and St Brendan’s Isle discovered by the Irishman during the 6th century.”31 St Brendan the Navigator, well into his seventies when he went on his outlandish journey, and trusting in God rather than any navigational tools, may have ended up in the Azores or Iceland.
People at the time knew of three continents and believed that across the great ocean there was the Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown southern land. It was too hot for men, but among the races that could be found there were the Sciopods, monsters with one large foot; when it became too hot they simply lay on their back and used their feet as shade. Also expected to be found in this faraway land were the Antipodes, whose feet point backwards; the Amazons, who had a single breast; Cynocephales, men with the head of a dog; Panoti, men with elephant trunks; and Blemmyae, who have no heads at all but faces on their chests. Outside of the known world there could also be found Headless Men, or Ethiopian Troglodytes, and some groups in the east supposedly ate their parents—although there were certainly cannibals in remote parts of Asia, even until relatively modern times. Of these Marvels of the East, a twelfth century manuscript now at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford included two-headed snakes, centau
rs, and unicorns, this worldview influenced by classical mythology.
Perhaps nothing better captured the imagination than dragons. Faraway Sri Lanka, to the south of Prester John’s empire, was full of them, according to popular belief, but these terrifying creatures featured as objects of fascination in almost every culture. Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, saw the dragon as the arch-enemy of the archetype hero, the monster that had to be defeated in order for good to triumph—by the Norse hero Sigurd, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, or the Christian St George—but also the monster within us.
Great men of the thirteenth century such as Albert the Great and Roger Bacon thought that the equator was incapable of sustaining life because of its heat, and so men only inhabited the northern hemisphere; this was believed until the fifteenth century when Portuguese explorers proved it wrong by sailing all the way around the Cape of Good Hope. Little was really known of the world beyond, and European maps were still primitive compared to those of antiquity; typically, they showed a T-shape of the world with Asia at the top, Europe and Africa below. In contrast, in the more advanced Chinese model, the equator is seen as a circle around the globe, an idea the Europeans would borrow from the East one day, along with eyeglasses, paper, and gunpowder.
Before the mid-thirteenth century, no European had gone further east than Baghdad and returned. Then, between 1276 and 1291, an explorer from Venice called Marco Polo had reached the court of the faraway Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan. The Polo company had on their travels reached Lop, an “immense, dry, salt-encrusted lake bed covering extreme northwestern China, the wasteland . . . notorious for its special hazards” and which was “synonymous with the edge of the unknown.”32 In the Desert of Lop, it was said, merchants often heard malignant spirits calling out to them to follow, never to be heard of again.
Polo found many cultures utterly alien to Europeans. The women of Kamul, now Hami in western China, had a custom whereby “the stranger stays with his wife in the house and does as he likes and lies with her in a bed just as if she were his wife, and they continue in great enjoyment,” with the approval of their menfolk.33 In Burma, in contrast, Polo found people who poisoned strangers, inviting them to lodge in the house and then killing “him by night either by poison or by other things so that he died.”34 That way their soul would never leave the house and so bring it good fortune. Polo found Buddhists in south China who “eat all coarse things and they also eat human flesh very willingly, provided that he [the deceased] did not die a natural death”—they preferred those who died by this sword as they had “very good and savoury flesh.”35
Polo had also visited Russia, where he saw dog sledding and wrote that the people “have all their houses underground because of the great cold that is there.” In this icy land “these are sables and ermines and squirrels . . . and black foxes” from which they make skins and furs. After this he found another region in Russia, the “the land of shadows,” where men “live like animals . . . and it’s so cold that people’s urine gets frozen.”36
London’s merchants had recently begun trading with this far-off country which they called their “land of darkness.” It was still at the very edge of their slowly expanding consciousness; centuries earlier Alfred, King of Wessex, had received a visitor who had travelled to the far north of Norway where reindeer herdsmen scraped a living, and told fantastic tales. Beyond that, in the frozen wastes of the Arctic, there lay a land where it was forever winter, sailed only by hardy Viking adventurers three centuries earlier and named, with some irony, Greenland. As one approached the coast of this vast landmass, a visitor would find “rising out of the frigid, white-capped sea” a land of always winter that “gazed up at monstrous cliffs of silvery ice shimmering in the brilliant, bitter sunlight.”37
The people here lived on the very edge of existence, dependent on supplies from across the sea, and towards the end of the last century they would have been among the first humans to notice that the winters were getting harsher. People in London or Alnwick might not have known it yet, but the world was getting colder and a great disaster was unfolding.
*The Trent roughly occupies the same point of the map of England as the Trident does in Westeros.
2
THE IRON KING
No matter how much I make up, there’s stuff in history that’s just as bad, or worse.
—GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
It could take up to half an hour for a burning man to die. The Flemish chronicler Froissart’s description of a criminal going to the flames during the reign of France’s Mad King Charles captures the horror of the punishment:
They hustled him on. The fire was ready. A gibbet had been set up in the square, and at the foot of it a stake with a heavy iron chain. Another chain hung from the top of the gibbet with an iron collar attached. This collar, which opened on a hinge, was put round his neck, then fastened and hauled upwards so that he should last longer. The first chain was wound round him to bind him more tightly to the stake. He was screaming and shouting. As soon as he was secured to the stake, great heaps of woods were piled against it and set on fire. They flamed up immediately. So was he hanged and burned, and the King of France could have seen him from his window if he had wanted to.1
The stake was a terrifying and agonizing way to die, and so reserved for the most heinous of crimes—and there were few as abominable as heresy. And so, in March 1314, the people of Paris had gathered on an island in the center of the city to watch four old warriors being led to their deaths for such a crime. The men were members of the Knights Templar, an order of sworn brothers founded two centuries earlier to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Over the years the Templars had grown into a military power fighting a holy war, the most famous order of brothers sworn to take no wives and to defend civilization, recognizable by their white tunics. And yet the brothers had become more than that; with their reputation for honesty and their muscle, and with bases across Europe and the Near East, the group had also begun handling large amounts of money, growing into a sort of international banking organization, enormously powerful and wealthy. But like bankers through the ages they had become resented—and so when the Crusades were lost in 1303, they were inevitably vulnerable to rival powers.
And there was no one more powerful in Europe than the King of France, the country being at that point by far the leading state in the Christian world. France was “supreme,” in the words of one historian, “her superiority in chivalry, learning, and Christian devotion was taken for granted, and as traditional champion of the Church, her monarch was accorded the formula of ‘Most Christian King.’”2 French was the language of the ruling class in England, Flanders, and much of Italy, the language of law as far away as Jerusalem, and everywhere in Europe the language of scholars and poets. Kings of French blood sat on thrones from the eastern Mediterranean to the rocky Atlantic coast of Ireland; French words in their thousands found their way into languages across the continent.
Tracing descent from the barbarian Frankish kingdom founded in the ruins of Roman Gaul, the kings of France sat in the royal court in Paris, the center of the Western world. And the current monarch, Philippe le bel, “the handsome,” was a domineering and icy-cold man intent on expanding his power.
Philippe IV, also known as the Iron King, was likened to a statue for his coldness, or an owl who says nothing but simply stares (the bishop who made that remark soon regretted it). Philippe was a pious man who wore a hair shirt and regularly whipped himself, and “those who met him found his fixed stare, his long silences and his mysterious manner disconcerting.”3 But for all his religious devotion, he was not a man to be crossed, and the punishment dished out to the Templars was not even the worst of his cruelty; other enemies he had flayed alive.
The head of the Capetian dynasty, Philippe’s line had begun with Hugh Capet in 987; further back the Franks had once been a Germanic tribe who overran the northern part of Gaul and accepted the submission of the Gallo-Roman population there. Emb
racing Christianity soon after the fall of the empire, they had steadily adopted the language of the native Latins, a tongue that had evolved into Old French.
The Iron King had been crowned at the cathedral in Reims, north of Paris, like his forefather Clovis eight centuries earlier, where the archbishop handed him the sword once wielded by his ancestor Charlemagne, fastening it to the king’s side and reciting “Accipe hunc gladium cun Demi benediction”4—Accept this sword with God’s blessing. Philippe had now ruled for thirty years and foresaw a strong and long dynasty ahead of him, with three sons grown to manhood and one surviving daughter married to the king of England. They had just two years earlier produced a grandchild for him, a boy called Edward.
Yet the august and sovereign kingdom of France was in financial trouble, and Philippe’s ruinous spending led him to search for new sources of revenue. So without even asking the Pope, Clement V, Philippe conspired to have the brotherhood destroyed and to take their wealth. In 1307, he sent secret orders to arrest all fifteen thousand members of the brotherhood in France for crimes, in the words of Philippe’s secret orders, “horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear of . . . an abominable work, a detestable disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed set apart from all humanity.” Only two dozen escaped that day, Friday the thirteenth.*
Numerous men who had been thrown out of the Knights Templar were brought forward as witnesses, happy to make all sorts of allegations against them. The Templars were accused of selling their souls to the devil, sex with each other and with succubi—female demons who supposedly had carnal relations with men—and various other sordid activities. They were also supposed to have drunk a powder made from the ashes of dead comrades and their own illegitimate children.
The crimes were totally implausible even to a credulous public, although most of the Templars confessed to their guilt—but then most people probably would admit to sex with demons after prolonged torture by the Holy Inquisition. Among the methods authorized were the rack, in which the victim was horribly stretched until they confessed; the strapedo, whereby a man was raised over a beam by a rope tied to the wrists bound behind his back, until he confessed; or rubbing fat on the soles of the victim’s feet and placing them before a fire, until he confessed. Sometimes, as with one knight called Bernardo de Vado, this went wrong and his bones fell out, which was not the intention.