His portrayal of the Iron Bank being this all-powerful and controling entity makes no fucking sense. Does this fat retard have any idea how often rulers used to default on their debts during the Middle Ages?
>>25297228Aren't weren't they all former slaves or something? I didn't think they made sense either
>>25297228It’s not portrayed as all-powerful.
>>25297228Oh look, another fucking retard who thinks fantasy and historical fiction are the same thing. Idiot.
>>25297254If it's not supposed to be period accurate then why did he give Tolkien so much shit for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy
Medieval banks didn't have supernaturally powerful assassins working for them
>>25297228The Iron Bank would most likely need a nation's backing to actually remain important, especially since the risk of the bank hiring like fifty million mercenaries might not seem all that dire in a bad winter.
>>25297285It’s fantasy, it could be a different universe contained within the eye of a blue-eyed giant. Appealing to historical accuracy in fantasy is not the same as questioning logical consistency within the setting.
>>25297228It makes sense when you find out the show was a propaganda piece in favor of the modern, judaized and foul world.
>>25297285irony to cplian about lack of Aragorn's tax policy and not even explain how taxes in Westeros work.Like does North even pay taxes to Robert?
Points taken, but it's stated that if rulers default, the Iron Bank will support rival claimants to the throne. I think their current plan is to loot Lannister gold.
It's kinda true. 9 medieval kings out of 10 were glorified debt collectors for usurers, just think of the norman dynasty of England before Edward Longshanks. It only got worse with time, too. Fuggers, Borgias, etc.
>>25298952>9 medieval kings out of 10 were glorified debt collectors for usurersOn this episode of pseuds repeating western protestant pop history tropes about the early modern period retroactively applied to the Middle Ages to make the Middle Ages look inordinately bad...It's funny how there's basically no examples of this outside Byzantium, because Western Europe's society in Medieval times actually wasn't eve complex enough for usurers to want to take the risk pandering to it. The threat of just being murked and having your shit taken was all too real, muh 1000 expulsions of Jews prove this to be the case. And I don't even see such a lack of "civilisational complexity" as a bad thing btw, just for the record. I think that's what killed the byzzies at the end of the day.
>>25297228The Medici would have collected those debts if they had an esoteric order of magic ninja assassins to collect those debts to anon's point >>25297289.I'm not a GRRM dickrider but the Iron Bank is actually a pretty fun metaphor for "the threat of retarded kings treating banks as giant purses without thinking there will be any consequences" without including an essay on medieval economics in the books.
>>25297228This sort of thing actually did happen historically though. The Fuggers Bank in the HRE deliberately screwed over Francis I of France who was trying to buy the crown of the Empire by financing Charles V because Francis was a cunt who never paid his loans. Similarly the Bank of Genoa frequently financecd Corsican political/noble factions, with the explicit threat that if they tried to default they'd finance rebellions in their territory to fuck their shit up.The Napoleanic Wars also were in many ways the Rothschilds trying to stop Napoleon from taking the knife to the international banking system by financing all of his enemies. Exact same thing happened to Hitler a century and change later. So it's not absurd--the fact that they would finance military action against defaulting kings is the most realistic thing about it. The least realistic part of it in the case of Westeros it's kind of implausible that they'd take the risk in the first place because Westeros is like White Angola except it's the size of South America.
>>25301100The Rothschilds were made nobility by the Habsburgs and I am sure that would have been their issue with Napoleon if anything but ultimately they were just smart financially, at Waterloo they famously had a guy waiting to see how the battle was going to relay the information back immediately so they knew what position to take on British bonds. Napoleon did not want to abolish privatized banking. Neither did Hitler, in fact money that the Nazis seized from Jews and other countries, flooded private banks, and Lebensraum inder Nazis, as in Israel, was very popular with banks because they could aquire valuable property on the super cheap, once the owners were liquidated or evicted, and develop and resell it for a fortune.
