What the above means is that if, say, Tywin Lannister wants his army, he only gets it if House Falwell, and Ferren and Foote and Clegane choose to come out and fight for him. If Tywin wants to administer the countryside, change a law, count his subjects, impose new taxes – he can only do these things if the houses under him follow through (remember, he has functionally no administrative apparatus of his own – that’s why he outsourced the job). But, Tywin’s options to coerce this cooperation are – because of those castles – extremely limited.
To refer to a distinction introduced in Wayne Lee’s talk [here] – Tywin cannot rely on force (do it because I will kill you if you don’t), he has to use power (do it because you think you ought). Because the apparatus of the state here is very limited, that power is largely generated through personal relationships – you ought to fight for your liege because you have a personal relationship with him. You see him fairly often, you swore loyalty to him (in person!!), he (or his ancestors) have helped resolve your problems in the past and most importantly, because he has kept faith with you in the past.
Which is a way of saying that this system runs on trust and reputation, and that runs both ways. Even as Tywin watches his vassals for signs of disloyalty, his vassals are watching him. Is he true to his word? Can I trust him? Because if the answer is no – I best start hedging my bets. And that bet-hedging is going to come in ways Tywin does not want – I might refuse to come out and fight, or redirect my efforts to fortifying my own holdings, or even switch over to another liege. And in the very early seasons, key characters – most notably Tywin and Tyrion – know this and act accordingly. Tywin talks a good game about lions and sheep, but when it comes down to it, he knows his reputation matters – what the sheep say about the lion matters a great deal, it turns out. Robb Stark’s failure to handle the Karstarks, Tullys and Freys is his eventual undoing. Tyrion berates Cersei on returning to King’s Landing for her actions which might call the Lannister reputation into question (“that bit of theatre will haunt our family for a generation”.)
What is unusual here is how frequently key characters deviate from the norms these societies need to function – Westerosi nobles are stunningly treacherous for people who rely on systems based in trust for survival. In a system which runs on trust and reputation, elites tend to value trust and reputation. They produce literature extolling it (as, indeed, do most “mirrors for princes” – guidebooks on how to be a good ruler – from the Middle Ages do; see, for instance, Book 3 of Dhouda’s Liber Manualis (9th cent.), which goes on and on about trustworthiness) and refine its practice. The sort of eye-popping treachery so common in Game of Thrones was far rarer in the actual historical Middle Ages for exactly the reason Game of Thrones would lead you to believe: it is almost always self-defeating.
The problem here comes in the later seasons and how they re-contextualize all of this concern. That problem has a name, and it is Cersei. Cersei breaks all of these rules. Even early on, she has her soldiers (who recall – are not paid mercenaries, but likely vassals of her house who can very much take their skills elsewhere if they don’t like their current employer) demonstrate her own capricious untrustworthiness on Lord Baelish (she has also, I will note, mistaken violence for power). She humiliates Barriston Selmy in court, a spectacle her own future vassals might have remembered. She incinerated her own family – by blood and marriage – along with her erstwhile allies. Cersei is endlessly treacherous, often foolishly and obviously so, and yet …
And yet it doesn’t matter. The Lannister bannermen in the penultimate episode mount the walls to fight a doomed battle for her anyway. Not only is that behavior inexplicable, it hardly seems possible. Who, after all, is raising and leading these men? Who is coordinating supplies and grain shipments to the capital? Remember, the reason for this distributed system of political leadership is that the central state does not have the administrative apparatus to raise armies or feed cities on its own – it has to outsource that to vassals. Vassals that Cersei has murdered or alienated, almost to a man. Cersei is defeated because dragons are unstoppable monsters, but she should have been defeated because she would have simply been incapable of raising an army at all.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.
November 27, 2025
QotD: Honor, homage, and fealty in Game of Thrones
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