West - Iron, fire and ice: the real history that inspired Game of thrones

Copyright 2019 by Ed West

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3564-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3565-1

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Learning of his fathers death, the adolescentdashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the Northvows to avenge him in combat. Despite his youth, he has already won several battles and commands the loyalty of many of the leading families of the realm; he is supported in this war by his mother, who has spirited away her two younger sons to safety far from the rampaging armies of their fathers enemies. Against them is the queen, passionate and proud and strong-willed and with more of the masculine virtues of the time than most men. She too is battling for the inheritance of her young son, not yet fully grown but already a sadist who takes delight in watching executions.

This tale will sound familiar to fans of George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire series, and its HBO television adaptation Game of Thrones , but this is not the story of Westeros; rather of the real-life realm of England in 1461. On March 29 of that year, the deadliest battle ever fought on British soil took place on a spot now called Bloody Meadow in Yorkshire, deep within what was once the old kingdom of the north. Lasting into the night, despite a thick blizzard, the Battle of Towton was marked by extreme brutality, and by the end of the fighting some twenty-eight thousand men lay dead, many executed after the battles end. It was the climax to six years of violence and would decide which family ruled the kingdom.

On one side was an army led by Edward, Earl of Marchthe name was pronounced Eddard at the timethe eighteen-year-old heir to the House of York, who had claimed the throne that year following the beheading of his father, Richard of York. Facing him were the forces of the House of Lancaster, fighting in the name of the queen, Margaret of Anjou, and her husband, the mad King Henry VI, whose weak mind had been the cause of Yorks rebellion.

Edward had recently won a victory at Mortimers Cross, close to the Welsh border, weeks after his father and brother Edmund were slain at Wakefield. Richard of York, a descendant of the great warrior king Edward III through both his mother and father, had emerged in the 1450s as the most powerful man in the kingdom, but he would not win the throne. Instead his head was stuck on a pole in the city of York with a paper crown placed on top in mockery of his ambitions; his son Edward had sworn vengeance and would get it. Still barely a grown man, he went on to win a series of battles before his success was imperiled by his choice of bride.

By the time the conflict between the Houses of York and Lancaster had burned itself out, the bones of three or even four generations of some families would be scattered across the battlefields of England, the Plantagenet line destroyed in the fury of the Cousins War. During this period, 25 percent of male aristocrats in the kingdom died violently, and some houses were entirely wiped out in a cycle of vengeance that came to break all the laws of warfare.

The story would fascinate future generations, retold in the plays of William Shakespeare and later by the nineteenth-century novelist Walter Scott, who popularized the name the War of the Roses in reference to the emblems of the two families. It was this dynastic conflict that would provide much of the historical inspiration for George R.R. Martin when he wrote his fantasy series. Martin, a keen fan of popular history, has spoken on occasions about the people and periods that he drew on. A Song of Ice and Fire is set in the Realm, or Seven Kingdoms, a country comprising the southern half of the island of Westeros. These books tell the story of the struggle to win the Iron Throne by a number of competing families: among them are the Lannisters, the richest clan in the Realm, who have gained control of the capital, Kings Landing, in the southeast of the island; the Starks, who are the leading family of the old northern kingdom; and the Baratheons, who trace their roots to an ancestor who helped a great conqueror several generations earlier. It is a brutal and tragic world, one where the only options for those playing the game of thrones are victory or death.

As well as being an epic fantasy in its own right, Game of Thrones is also a fantastic (in both senses of the word) retelling of the story of the real RealmEngland. It was inspired, in the authors own words, not just by The Wars of the Roses... but also the Hundred Years War, the Crusades, the Norman Conquest,worlds of Egypt, Rome, and Greece, through to the flowering of medieval civilization and beyond to the Renaissance and the birth of the early modern world. And the struggle for the throne of England, from the Saxon invasion in the fifth century to the downfall of the House of York a millennium later, is as fascinating as any fiction on earth.

George R.R. Martin first laid out the concept for his novel A Game of Thrones in a letter to his agent in 1993. He called it a cycle of plot, counterplot, ambition, murder and revenge, with the iron throne of the Seven Kingdoms as the ultimate prize.

Or as novelist John Lanchester wrote of the series: The Wars of the Roses, in this reimagining, areas they surely were in real lifea blood-soaked, treacherous, unstable world, saturated in political rivalries, in which nobody is safe... Its not a world any sane person would want to live in, not for a moment. The show is also utterly amoral. There is no right or wrong. And that is the attraction.

History is the underlying inspiration, but Game of Thrones is also influenced by the genre of medieval heroism that originated with the tales of King Arthur and Chrtien de Troyes, epic stories from the birth of medieval Europe that informed how people thought of the world. But unconstrained by a need for accuracy, fantasy allows the author and reader far greater freedom, so what we have is an epic retelling of the War of the Roses without the burden of history. Any historical comparison can only go so far, and no character exactly matches a real historical figure, and yet most of what takes place in Westeros can be found in a specific period of European history that historians refer to as the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, when England and France were ruined by war, famine, plague, and social and religious upheaval. It is this period, 1315 to 1461, that this book will mostly cover, telling the backstory of European history as the narrative progresses.