Robert's Rebellion breakdown - How did the Targaryens lose?

the Targaryen had a huge tactical advantage at the start of Robert's rebellion so how did they manage to lose the war hi everyone this is Robert welcome to in deep geek this video is brought to you by my wonderful patreon community if you'd like to support this channel or get access to some patron and new content please do check out my patreon page there's a link in the description this is the latest in a series of videos looking anew at what really happened in Robert's rebellion the tourney at Harrenhal and the tower of joy this is a standalone video but is based on a lot of what we looked at in previous videos so if you want to check out the first few videos in the series first then come back here feel free this time we will be looking at the first half of Robert's rebellion and in particular how the Targaryen loyalists lost their advantage because when war broke out they were actually in a relatively strong position if only they could capitalize on it for all the talk of a massive alliance being put together by the Starks it wasn't yet in place the Tully's may have been sympathetic but they weren't yet bound into the pact by marriage lianna's wedding to Robert Baratheon was obviously off and the near engagement of Jaime Lannister to Lysa Tully was also off the rebellion was being driven not by family ties and allegiances but by the strong personal bond between Jon Arryn Robert Baratheon and Ned Stark and this was not exactly an experience set of Lords paramount Robert Baratheon had only recently become Lord of the Stormlands and Ned hadn't expected to ever be Lord of Winterfell and wasn't really trained for it in book 1 we sometimes catch him even as a grown man wondering what Brandon his elder brother would have done because it was Brandon who had been trained for leadership not Ned and crucially the three of them John Robert and Ned were all in the Eyrie together at the time of the effective declaration of war the Eyrie might be almost impossible to storm but being in the Vale all meant that the three of them were effectively trapped by geography into a corner of Westeros the Vale is bounded by mountains and the sea and if Robert and Ned were to call their banners then they would need to get out first out through the main pass through the mountains of the moon to the Kings Road would be far too risky even if it was possible after the return of winter just a few weeks or months earlier the other main way out would be by boat from gull town the only city in the Vale and the only major port but that was staying loyal to the crown so no ships were going out that way the rebels were trapped and even if they did manage to get out it would be months maybe even a year before Ned could get to the north raise his army and get back down south and even if Robert Baratheon could call his banners that army would be completely cut off from the main rebel force encircled by the loyalist territories of the crown lands dawn and the reach the Targaryen plan should have been a straightforward one stop Robert and Ned getting out of the Vale and calling their banners slow down Jon Arryn by supporting loyalist Lords in the Vale and if Robert and Ned did manage to get out isolate and destroy the Baratheon army before he could link up with its allies time and logistics were on the Targaryen side they were the people in power and they had other advantages to the largest army by far in the Seven Kingdoms is the army of the reach which is probably twice as large as the next largest and was loyalists two of the three dominant fleets in the Seven Kingdoms the Royal fleet and the red wine fleet were loyalists and the third the iron fleet was neutral and the person he became known as the finest general in the land randyll Tarly and the most legendary individual fighters like Barristan Selmy and Arthur Dayne were loyalists everything pointed to a swift and decisive Targaryen victory the only real chance that the rebellion had of winning would be if almost everything went there swiftly retaking ghul town getting Ned and Robert back to their homes undetected Robert somehow getting himself in his army through hundreds of miles of heavily patrolled enemy territory to the Riverlands to link up with the other forces the Tully's being brought formally into the Alliance randyll Tarly the reach forces and the red wine fleets to stay out of the major battles dawn to only respond half-heartedly the legendary fighters like Arthur day not to actually fight and so on but must have seemed an impossible ask at the time but of course all of that happened over the course of a year the disloyalty and incompetence of the loyalist forces as well as some sheer bad luck turned what should have been a swift victory into a crushing defeat but how and why first of all their priority had to be to stop Ned and Robert from escaping the Vale and calling their banners simply put without Ned and Robert there would be no rebellion they drove it as we noted gold town was remaining loyal to the crown and a siege was looking likely which would take time so Ned decided not to wait for that and instead to hack off through the mountains of the moon to the north to the fingers to try to catch a boat from there to the north no doubt there was a road the fingers is connected to the rest of the Vale but this will have been a treacherous journey through mountain passes shortly after winter had returned to Westeros after the fall spring and if you'll remember it was a particularly bad returned winter with heavy snow frozen rivers and thick ice all the way as far south as King's Landing and there are the mountain clans to avoid of course but Ned made his way through and found a fisherman who would sail him across the beach to white Harbor if we were in any doubt at all about how touch-and-go this all was for the rebellion at this time what happened next should make that clear because Ned's ship was caught up in a storm the fisherman died and the Ned barely survived it's sometimes fun to play games of what if and this is such a critical moment that it's probably worth us reflecting on what would have happened if Ned had died then well to start with Ned was off on his own so it would probably be a little while before it registered with anyone that he wasn't going to make it but when it did become apparent that leaves young benjin as Lord of Winterfell now benjin was probably already quite conflicted about the rebellion because unlike Ned he knew that it was based on a lie I set out in a previous video why I think that he knew about Rhaegar and Lyanna so would he really be willing to send thousands of Northmen to war and possibly their death for a lie I suspect not plus he didn't really have that bond with Robert Baratheon that Ned it being close to Liana he probably shared her view that Robert was a bit of an ass added to which benjin would then be the only stark left other than lianna who was who knows where so he was the stark that must always be in Winterfell he couldn't go marching down the Kings Road even if he wanted to so if Ned had died at sea the Starks entry into the war would have been far from certain and if the North did march it would almost certainly have been delayed the stark army wouldn't have arrived in time at Stony Sept Robert Baratheon would surely have eventually been found by Jon connington and the loyalist army as we'll look at in a moment and without Ned and Robert that rebellion would surely have faltered all but for chance but that's enough of Ned's story for this video we'll pick up with him and the fisherman's daughter in another video because although his surviving was partly luck Robert Baratheon surviving in the rebellion as a whole being victorious was largely down to incompetence and disloyalty by the Targaryen allies and we saw this first at gull town we've already noted the importance of goal town neither the book nor show focused much on it as a place but it really is central to the effective running of the Vale it's where the Vale fleet is based most of its trade comes through and during winter pretty much the only way in or out and Mark Grafton Lord of Gaul town decided to stay loyal to the Targaryen king rather than his rebel Lord Jon Arryn every one with an ounce of sense will have known that the first battle in this rebellion would have been there Jon Arryn simply had to capture the city in order for the rebellion to work but extraordinarily the Targaryen seemed to have just left the Grafton's to it the reason appears to have been that Aerys simply wasn't taking the rebellion seriously at this point there seemed to have been some Targaryen ships patrolling the sea but no significant presence in defending the city itself this was the rebel army at its smallest and most vulnerable no Northman no one from the Riverlands no Baratheon army and without even the whole of the Vale on site but the Targaryen missed the opportunity to nip the rebellion in the bud the result was a United Vale and Robert Baratheon able to sail home to rally his banners in the Stormlands it was a pretty basic error with some pretty significant implications this failure does at least appear to have spurred Owen Meriwether the hand of the king at the time into some sort of action as in the Vale so in the Stormlands some houses didn't answer Robert Baratheon's calling of the banners deciding to stay loyal to the crown a win Mary whether persuaded three of those houses fell Granderson and Catherine to join forces and confront Robert but again there appears to have been no actual support for this in terms of soldiers to help fight the battle that would surely follow which shows that Aerys and his hand simply didn't learn the lessons of goal town the rebellion was in its infancy to be sure but that's when a competent ruler would quash it not later when it has gathered momentum and an army what happened was that Robert learned of the plan for the three houses to join together we don't know how but the clear implication here is that someone must have betrayed them I have my suspicions but not actual evidence that it might have been Varys whoever it was there clearly was some disloyalty going on and Robert capitalized on it by racing to the plotters meeting place and defeating each army in turn as they arrived needless to say this victory was only possible because he will have probably outnumbered his foes in every battle that may not have been the case had they been able to meet and unite their forces first and we should probably briefly name check the venue here for this arranged meet up between Targaryen loyalists it was at summer hall the place that everyone knew that Rhaegar Targaryen loved her the most and went to regularly I find it hard to believe that this was a random choice of venue we went major on Rhaegar whereabouts in this video but on the reasonable assumption that most people didn't know where he was this is the most sensible guess for where he might have been hiding at the very least Oh in Merryweather must surely have hoped to be on hope that Rhaegar might have been there and could meet up with these forces Rhaegar was not only a very competent fighter remember he won the tourney at Harrenhal and charismatic leader he was also the heir to the throne the person most able to rally the opposition to the rebellion given how disliked Aerys was it's easy to paint Owen Merryweather as the ineffective hands that Aerys eventually decided he was but he was definitely hamstrung by Eris's unwillingness to take the rebellion seriously and actually commit any troops to its defeat and so the result of the battles here was to allow Robert to secure the Stormlands and unite his banners and it also provided a little bit of momentum for the second battle in a row Robert Baratheon apparently performed some personal heroics defeating the rebel Lords personally face-to-face in the heat of the battle there is no doubt that at this stage of his life Robert was a strong and charismatic leader his troops followed him because they respected him not just because they had been ordered to you at which point we should take stock of the situation I painted a picture at the start of this video of a rebel victory looking unlikely the northern army hadn't been raised yet the Stormlands army hadn't been raised yet and the Vale Lords were fighting among themselves the rebels were isolated and outnumbered and yes to the Targaryen loyalists singly failed to capitalize on the situation they didn't support Ghul town allowing the Vale to unite allowed Ned and Robert to escape and raise their armies and didn't actively support the Stormlands rebels the result was that all three of the main protagonists in this rebellion Jon Arryn Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon were now able to raise their armies and go to war but even at this point the advantage was probably still with the Targaryen 's because at this point it wasn't so much about army size as their relative positions the stark Aaron and Baratheon armies were hundreds thousands of miles apart it's obviously easier to win battles when your opponents are split up much like Robert Baratheon defeated his own rebel Lords one at a time at summerhall by having a larger army than any of his opponents did individually the opportunity was there for the Targaryen loyalists to outmaneuver and outnumber each of the rebel forces in turn in particular they could start by defeating Robert's Stormlands army which was probably less than half the size of the reach army for example let alone if you added in dawn and the crown lands Robert was not a fool and he will have realized this so his next move was not to try to take King's Landing straightaway though it was quite close and instead to give it a wide berth and head north to try and join up with Ned and Jon Arryn who were aiming to converge on Riverrun to persuade haast Tully to join up with them in order to do so he would have to pass very close to dawn and into the reach deep into enemy territory if either of those two armies had been operating effectively Robert would have been stopped in his tracks but we know he eventually made it so what went wrong this time for the Targaryen loyalists first up dawn dawn despite their history of antipathy towards the seven kingdoms had been bought into the targaryen alliance through the marriage of Rhaegar and Elia and the Thais there were not just symbolic or political they were personal Oberyn Martell was very close to Elia and after the war Doran Martell spent the next decade and a half plotting the Lannisters downfall because of what they did to her they cared about her deeply and lewin Martell Doren's uncle was a member of the Kingsguard so sworn to protect heiresses life so you'd expect the Martel's to be among the most loyal of houses but they came very late to the party they didn't rouse themselves to try to stop Robert's army at all even though he was passing along their northern border and for a long time it looked as though they wouldn't send any troops to help the crown at all eventually Aerys threatened to them pointing out that he had to Elia Martell and her children in King's Landing effectively turning the wife of the heir to the throne into a hostage it was only then finally that Prince Doran sent ten thousand troops to help we don't know the exact size of the Dornish army but this was clearly only a small part of it Doran sent only what he felt he had to send to protect his sister no more so what was going on well it's fair to say that the Martel's weren't happy with Aerys as their King he was cruel Delia refused to attend her marriage to Rhaegar and turned up his nose at her first child because he thought she smelt Dornish which was clearly meant as an insult added to his other cruelties and unpredictable tempers and well-known paranoia that Rhaegar was trying to launch a coup against him house Martell were probably very justified in fearing for Elias safety from the Dornish perspective they actually had very little motivation for wanting Aerys to stay in power their main focus was in protecting Elia and her children that meant appearing loyal but not actually doing much to protect Aerys of course the whole Rhaegar and Lyanna thing will have complicated things even further and I will definitely come back to dorm the Martel's and rhaegar in a future video in this series because I think there's a lot of important stuff going on there that hasn't been talked about but the main point for here is that Dawn weren't really that bothered with keeping Eris in power hence them not engaging Roberts army when it was on their northern borders but what about the rich army we've already noted that it was the largest army in Westeros with one of the largest fleets and possibly the finest General in randyll Tarly and Robert's army did enter the reach on its journey to the Riverlands even if dawn could be forgiven for not being particularly proactive in facing off against Roberts army while it was vulnerable surely the Tyrells had to do something well I want to suggest to you that's like dawn though they may have been technically a part of the loyalists cause they were only doing so half-heartedly and in fact mace Tyrell proactively sought out ways to not be involved in the conflict because the Tyrells weren't involved in any of the major conflicts in the rebellion there was one battle they did get involved in the Battle of Ashford and I think it's quite instructive about the motivations of all those involved after summerhall Roberts force headed west before striking north to meet up with Ned and John Erin's armies as we noted earlier this was probably in order to give King's Landing a wide berth at some point around here Jon connington the newly appointed hand of the king was raising an army and bragging loudly about how he would return with Roberts head but I also discussed the possibility that Robert heard a rumor about radars whereabouts and was trying to hunt him down or that he was trying to be clever and secure a castle to protect the rebellions western flank from the reach forces regardless of the motivations here Robert and his army came to Ashford which is over the border into the reach there they were met by the van of the reach army the advance group led by randyll Tarly and that over ran Robert's army even before the bulk of the force under mace Tyrell could join the battle we are told that the battle was indecisive implied that casualties weren't huge on either side but it was definitely a clear if small victory for the loyalist forces the only one they had in the entire war but what is very intriguing here is what happened next or rather what didn't mace Tyrell arrived just at the end of that battle with his army just in time to claim the victory as his own everyone of course knew it was actually randyll Tarly victory but that debate actually distracts away from the obvious fact that the entire reach army were now there on home soil having just pushed back Robert Baratheon's forces with a fraction of their own and they did nothing surely if mace Tyrell were even slightly interested in defeating Robert's army he would have given chase they had every advantage and surely randyll Tarly would have wanted to but no they didn't the moment to mace Tyrell arrived they seemed to stop fighting and let Robert first escape the battlefield and then keep marching his army northwards and then mace did something even more inexplicable he marched almost his entire army and got the entire red wine fleet to besieged storm's end far away from any of the rest of the action in the war he didn't seriously attempt to capture it instead apparently spending most of his time feasting with his bannermen in a tent within sight of the castle for a year while the fate of the Seven Kingdoms was being decided in battles elsewhere and the moment Ned Stark arrived with his army he dipped his banners and took his army home without a hint of resistance this is an extraordinary tactical move storm's end is a strong castle and the seat of house Baratheon but its importance in this war was negligible Stannis and the small force that were there weren't going anywhere they'd been ordered to stay put and even if mace had wanted to besiege it he could have done that just as effectively with a fraction of his army you don't need tens of thousands of soldiers to procedure castle as relatively modest in size as storms end it was a ridiculous over commitment of troops it's tempting to say that this is just mace Tyrell being the kind of dim-witted Lord he presents himself as but this just seems too calculated to me everything he did seemed to be perfect for proving his loyalty to the crown without actually committing house Tyrell to the war he inflicted Robert Baratheon's first and only defeat in battle but held back from committing the whole of his army he enthusiastically went after the seat of House Baratheon but conveniently that meant that the Tyrells didn't get involved in any battles for the rest of the war he couldn't be accused of not fighting for the Targaryen 's but he also made sure he didn't really have to fight the rebels and if all of that seems a little too subtle for mace Tyrell let's not forget who else was on Team Tyrell at the time and was probably running things from behind the scenes alehna the queen of thorns now incidentally Alayna Tyrell had history with the Targaryen x' when she was much younger she had been engaged to dieren Targaryen apparently against her wishes the engagement was broken off however she says by her because of the oddness of the Targaryen x' for which we could read madness there are also heavy hints that this dieren was probably gay so he probably wasn't that keen on the match either but the point is that she had her suspicions about the Targaryen and was probably okay with them or Aerys at least losing power added to which this subtle political positioning during a time of warfare to ensure the Tyrells were peared loyal to the Targaryen z-- but also weren't making enemies of the rebels ensuring their continued favor whoever won the war is very much her style so the Targaryen had three chances at finishing off Robert's army before he could meet up with Ned and Jon Arryn through Robert's own Bannerman at Summer Hall which failed because someone betrayed their plans to Robert through dawn marching north to take his army which never happened because Doran Martell was angry about the treatment of Elia and by the reach army battling them a - word which proved inconclusive because mace Tyrell or probably lady Olenna didn't want to commit their full forces to the war in support of eros so what next for the targaryen 'he's an inept starch to the war had been followed by a series of betrayals or half-hearted responses from their allies and now robert had a clear route north to join up with Ned and John but the targaryen had one more attempt to stop him before he could do that as we've seen mace Tyrell had taken his army well away from the fighting so instead it fell to Jon connington the new hand to the king to raise an army in the Crown lands and chase after Robert Baratheon's army he appears to have done so with commendable speed harrying and bothering the army as it headed north although never quite managing to get into a full-scale battle with it at which point we reach a rather annoying information gap about what happens during this period Robert Baratheon definitely headed away from Ashford with an army but he next appears at Stony cept a town well into the river lands and most of the way to Riverrun injured on his own with no army in sight had Jon connington managed to whittle down his army bit by bit had Roberts split up his army to avoid detection got caught in an ambush and barely escaped with his life or had he just fancied a night in town on his own away from the rigors of leading an army we simply don't know my best guess is that he got injured in some skirmish with Jon connington czar me got cut off from his own army and took refuge in the town that makes sense of the injury the fact that he was there alone and that Jon connington apparently knew he was there but whatever the reasons Jon connington had Robert Baratheon trapped his troops took over the town going door-to-door hunting for any sight of the rebel leader but the people of Stoney Sept seemed to be on Roberts side passing him from hiding-place to hiding place this carried on for some time with Jon connington setting his army to route through the sewers offering bribes to the townsfolk and keeping prisoners in cages for all to see this may sound like quite a thorough search but there's a fascinating passage in a dance with dragons when Jon connington reflects on that time and recognises that someone like Tywin Lannister would not have been so measured in their approach instead they would have burned down the entire town regardless of the civilian casualties in an effort to find the usurper in a very real sense it was jon connington 'he's humanity or lack of cold callousness that saved robert baratheon for the search went on for so long that Ned and Jon Arryn who had met up at Riverrun headed down and routed connington tsar me and that was the point at which the balance of power shifted the rebel army was united at last the Tully's were brought formally into the alliance through marriage the Targaryen army was routed and the Targaryen allies were proving less than loyal we will look more at the second half of the rebellion next time suffice to say that the potential gain changes that the Targaryen did manage to roll out for the decisive battle of the Trident ray gars return Barristan Selmy fighting at last some Dornish troops finally entering the war were not enough but the damage had been done well before then the Targaryen x' had every chance to nip this rebellion in the bud but they did not take any of the many chances they had sometimes this was sheer bad luck sometimes inept leadership sometimes disloyalty and at the end it was also Jon connington humanity we may look back and think that Robert and Ned won the war but the more accurate description would be that this was a war that the Targaryen lost but what do you think let me know in the comments below please do check out my patreon page if you'd like to support this channel or get access to more exclusive content including my audio narrations of the pre-release chapters of the winds of winter and my new channel the well told tale thanks for watching that's all for this time I'll see you again soon

Channel: In Deep Geek

Views: 1,632,318

Keywords: indeepgeek, in deep geek, asoiaf, a song of ice and fire, robert's rebellion was built on a lie, robert's rebellion lore, robert's rebellion, game of thrones robert's rebellion, roberts rebellion, battle of Gulltown, battle of summerhall, battle of ashford, battle of ashford game of thrones, battle of the bells game of thrones, battle of the bells 283 ac, battle of the bells asoiaf, battle of the bells, stoney sept, game of thrones battle of the bells, theories, timeline, breakdown

Id: xMhU4mO0vQ4

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 30 2018