The politics: ‘Never killing anyone is not an option’

Helen Castor, medieval historian at Sidney Sussex College Cambridge

How do we know that anyone will win the Iron Throne? We don’t. We have this sense from the historical process that smaller territories come together to form bigger kingdoms – so the seven kingdoms of Westeros, and the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms – that this is an inevitable process. But it can go the other way. In Game of Thrones, it looks as if fragmentation is happening everywhere. And that’s scary. Think of relations between England and Scotland after the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and the threat in England from people who might have seemed like wildlings, raiding as far down as York, people who don’t acknowledge the validity of your structures and ideas: that was very powerful in the medieval world, just as it is in the show. Of course, no one has the power to raise the dead and add them to their own army, so there is that.



In those circumstances, to win a lasting victory, what a leader really needs is credibility. And what strikes me looking at this world is how few credible leaders there are left. Credibility is complicated: you need some sort of tenuous claim on authority that the world you’re operating in regards as legitimate, but if you have the personal and political qualities, it needn’t be much more than tenuous. So Henry Tudor, in 1485 – his claim on the throne was vanishingly small, but when everyone else had fought themselves to a standstill and Richard III had acted in a way that seemed indefensible, that gave him an in. So who is there in Game of Thrones?

You have Tommen as king of Westeros – well, there’s this biblical verse: “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.” Henry VI became king at nine months, and it wasn’t the fact that he was a child that caused the Wars of the Roses, but it didn’t help. A child king presents huge problems. And Cersei, who should be guiding him, can’t see more than two moves ahead.

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If Jon Snow comes back to life, and that black hair turns out to mean he has some Baratheon blood, he absolutely would be a contender, if he’s not preoccupied with the white walkers. But right now he is dead. Daenerys has the charisma, the legitimacy and the dragons, but she has been swept off goodness knows where by one of them, so she doesn’t have much of a power base. And even when she does regain her footing, she has two huge problems: one is that she’s not in Westeros, and she has to dig her feet into the soil: until she can present herself as a native contender, she is up against it. And she is a woman in a militarised world that assumes that women don’t rule. It isn’t impossible, but it’s the exception.

There is a lot of discussion about exploitation and nudity and what actors have to do in the show, but if we leave that to one side, there is something very powerfully historically resonant and real about it. Daenerys and Cersei operate in a world that, like the real medieval one, makes men’s bodies cheap because they can be cut down, and women’s bodies cheap because they can be used for sex. You only have to look around today to see what war does in terms of sexual violence. And, in the same way, whispers about a queen’s chastity (let alone incest) were a guaranteed way of undermining her, because the bloodline has to be beyond reproach. And if she dares to be assertive – someone like Margaret of Anjou, who became a key player because her husband was so useless – the immediate response was to say she was not a natural woman. So it’s not easy for either of them.

How do you win from here? You need to establish authority, and you need brilliant communications. Communication is such a huge issue; finding out quickly and reliably what’s happened. When Pope Innocent III excommunicated King John in 1209, it took months for the news to get from Rome to London. I love how we are seeing that play out – what’s happening at the wall is so huge, but Daenerys has no idea, and vice versa. And news of both reaches King’s Landing, but King’s Landing is engulfed in its own problems. It’s all unreliable, too. When someone says white walkers have been spotted, do you really believe that? If you are an ordinary person and a troop of armed men turn up saying your cause is lost, do you believe them and do what they say, or do you hold on to your loyalty? Up against all that, you need the best information network and the best people running it: someone of the calibre of Lord Varys, or the network of the Iron Bank of Bravos – it was always the merchants and the bankers, the likes of the Medicis, with commercial networks, who had the capacity to move information, and the states were always trying to replicate those networks.

In the absence of reliable communications, overt violence becomes inevitable. Today, we all rely on the knowledge that if there is trouble in the street, you can call the police. How do you govern thousands of square miles without any of that? Violence gets delegated, and it gets explicit.That’s not to say it always needs to be quite as brutal as it is in Game of Thrones. It’s interesting watching Daenerys struggling with how to walk that line. Never killing anyone is not an option. She has to establish her authority. But it’s about being responsible for the right ones at the right time in the right way. Working out who the right people are to kill and who are the wrong ones – that is a very powerful historical lesson.

The strategy: ‘A dragon is a useful thing to have’

Brigadier Roly Walker, head of strategy for the British army and former commander of 12th armoured infantry brigade

War is brutal and adversarial, and the best way to win a war is, rather than physically destroy the enemy, to destroy their will to fight. And while there are only so many parallels you can draw with the real world, it’s clear that in Game of Thrones, a dragon is a useful thing to have. You’re trying to get the adversary to accept that they are not going to win, so that they don’t even bother and just accept the terms of the occupation. The fear of chemical weapons probably outweighs their practical impact; the threat of violence can prevent things from happening, and an innovative weapon can be hugely effective. Dragons are an example of innovation. Though the idea that something like that, or like a tank in the first world war, will work successfully right away is fiction. When they’re first used, they never live up to expectations. It takes the believers going back to the drawing board, and eventually they persuade the rest. But what drove Winston Churchill into really pursuing the tank initiative was that it gave friendly troops hope. In the end, it can have a huge effect on morale.

But no sooner does a new capability come along than, once people have got over the fear, they start developing countermeasures and, ultimately, the countermeasures make the weapon irrelevant. That is why we no longer carry muskets. Very clever people, such as the codebreakers in the second world war, will find a way round it.

I suspect you wouldn’t try to defend yourself against a dragon. But you might think: how do we destroy the ability for a dragon to produce further dragons? And then, eventually, a dragon is going to kill a shepherd boy. Is the weapon now counterproductive? With a stupendously capable weapon, the effect may not be what you had hoped. The Israelis have found that if you start dropping bombs out of the sky from drones, the psychological impact it has is that it drives your adversary into rage. Because they cannot respond. And then that rage manifests itself in other ways. It may drive people into suicide bombing. The more you learn about a weapon that may be great, the more you have to think long and hard about how to use it.

You have to look at the use of wildfire at the battle of the Blackwater, for instance, in that context. It’s like the atomic dilemma at the end of the second world war. Are those tens of thousands of casualties worth the potential millions it would take to capture that terrain on the ground? One day, you are going to have to live with your adversaries. It’s a horrible dilemma, about whether it’s proportionate in the context of self-defence. On something like that, a military commander can advise, but ultimately it has to be a political decision.

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If you are thinking about how to manage particular battles, you have to bear in mind, as they do in Game of Thrones, how alliances shift – just how devious and capricious people can be in war when they have nothing to lose, and how irrational people can be when they are under extraordinary pressure. And to limit that unpredictability, you have to try to “fix” your enemy. At the battle of the Blackwater, the arrival of the Lannister-Tyrell reinforcements works by surprise. But the best use of surprise isn’t about them being completely unaware – which is usually impossible – it’s about timing and location, as with the Normandy landings in 1944. It’s not as if Napoleon didn’t know the Prussian army was moving at Waterloo; the point was that he had to defeat Wellington before the Prussians turned up, and he couldn’t and so lost the battle. You want the fact that you are coming to be inevitable and overwhelming, so that even if he sees you, there’s nothing he can do about it.

You also have to think about the fact that in the end, the war will finish, and then you have to be sure that you can live with the peace. That’s why these things are enshrined in law for us. The hundred years war, or other medieval conflicts, led to revulsion at the brutal, indiscriminate way that ordinary people were caught up in it. Armies rampage around and then they move off and the little people just have to cope with it. And that is something which our ways of war now try to attend to. We make an explicit effort to try to avoid the innocents – in Afghanistan, we went out of our way to try to warn people. In so doing we thought we were making them more likely to be sympathetic to us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gregor ‘The Mountain’ Cligane and The Viper slug it out. Photograph: Alamy

The combat: ‘Don’t fight with your helmet off’

Mark Heeney, captain of the Woodville Household, a 15th-century battle re-enactment group



The most realistic medieval combat I have ever seen was in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth. As the fight went on, they got slower and slower. By the end of it, they were absolutely knackered.



Game of Thrones is very enjoyable, but it isn’t really like that. Here, you have mostly got two or three characters facing off, and leaping all over the place. When, as re-enactors, we are in the armour, we have tried leaping around, and it doesn’t work for long. Especially if you’re on a medieval diet, or the sort of food they would have in Westeros. And the way they use their swords – in reality, a sword would only be sharp on the very end, and the other three feet were really just used as an iron bar. Armour was mostly impenetrable; if you had curved bits of steel, even a tempered arrow would skid off them. You could be bulletproof. But you could kill someone by bludgeoning them with a sword, breaking their bones through the armour. So when you see someone run past and the guy swipes at him and blood spurts out, it just wouldn’t happen. The worst thing you could face was the whole weight of your opponent, directly behind a 3ft-long sword. That would do the damage.

The Victorians destroyed so much of our understanding of the middle ages; their history of it made the knights all shiny. So I like the way Game of Thrones captures the messiness, the brutality and the blood. But if you did find yourself in a fight with someone with armour and a sword, you would know you were up against someone with serious dosh. So you wouldn’t want to kill him, because you could capture him and sell him back.

It certainly wouldn’t be easy to do that, though. As AJP Taylor wrote, the dismounted armoured man in the middle ages was the equivalent of the modern tank. He could walk through the battlefield and, if the armour was good, very little could stop him. So against that, you would want to aim for the eyes, the armpits, the feet, and the groin, which are the hardest areas to protect. And, as an armoured knight, you also wouldn’t want to fight with your helmet off. Every time a named character in Game of Thrones takes their helmet off on the battlefield, I am amazed.