Economics in Game of Thrones: The Iron Bank Always Collects

On how the Iron Bank has amassed its strength, Mondschein says: “They’ve built up a lot of wealth and capital, they’re very organized and they have access to Faceless Men (Braavosi assasins).

“That enables them to actually exert more political influence than bankers are able to exert in our world. They’re able to use the conventions of the fantasy world, but even more so, they have strong institutional structure, which is not the sort of thing you would find in medieval to early-modern banks.”

Banks in our medieval and early-modern eras were significantly smaller and often family-run, meaning there were many more personal connections. Rounding up an assassin to murder the guy who bakes bread for your sister-in-law just wasn’t that easy.

Of Banks and Wars

But despite that unrealistic element in the story, there are some similarities we can see between Martin’s world and ours. One of the most obvious is the connection between banks and wars.

According to the University of Calgary’s Applied History Research Group, “the greatest danger to medieval banking was in granting loans to European monarchs to finance wars.”

Mondschein echoes this claim. He says the 14^th and 15^th centuries of our world are good examples of this, when a rise in infantry-based armies was seen and huge supplies of money were needed to fund them.

“In that sense, Martin’s world is very realistic,” he says.

In Down and Out in Westeros, Mondschein writes there’s evidence that the Game of Throne’s economy is fully plausible, especially in terms of everyday sales.

“Since no one wants to carry around bags of gold and silver, most likely the Dragon (Westerosi currency), like the Ducat (former European gold coin), was primarily a money of account — in other words, paper money, given as a document called a “letter of exchange” that entitles the bearer to a certain amount of cash.”

Not for the Common Man

This method later developed into more advanced credit and borrowing systems, but it wasn’t easily accepted by everyone.

According to the academic John Munro, the idea of a mediaeval peasant using a bank is “a matter of considerable debate amongst economic historians.”

For people to use the banking system, they needed to understand it, says Munro, an economics professor at the University of Toronto.

And that understanding would not have been easy to achieve. Trying to convince someone that words and numbers on a bank ledger page could mean the same thing as a heavy, jingling bag of coins was no simple task.

With the societal parallels between that time period and the Game of Thrones world, it is safe to conclude many people there feel the same way about banking.

The series premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. EST. Grab a coat and some hot chocolate. Spring may have sprung, but tomorrow night, winter is coming.