Well, Robert said 40,000 in the show. And the Mongols (whom the Dorthaki are presumably based on) invaded Japan via ship with something like 140,000 troops, so 40,000 men plus horses doesn’t seem that infeasible. Granted Khal Drogo would obviously have to go conquer someone on his side of the ocean that had a bunch of boats first.
Curious that none of these supposedly smart people raised the question of Drogo’s reaction to the assassination of his wife. In the book, just the attempt resolved him to invade, so you would think one of them would at least raise the possibility of letting sleeping horde leaders lie.
Let her breed, and eventually she’s coming after them. Kill her, maybe Drogo will, maybe he won’t. Maybe Drogo loses interest since he doesn’t have a woman nagging at him to do it do it do it!
-Joe
I hate it when my wife nags me to invade other countries.
I keep telling her we don’t live anywhere near Poland! But nooooooo
-Joe
I think the idea is that Drogo without a blood relation to the Tangaryan family wouldn’t have any claim of legitimacy in Westros. Loosing the support of the people seemed to be Roberts main concern when talking to Cersei. Granted he’s still got Viserys (though I think Robert wanted to off him too), but as discussed above, Drogo seems to want to found a dynasty, not help some winy brother in law found his.
But how could Robert be* sure* that this long-distance assassination would be successful? I can’t remember–had he tried to off Dany & Viserys before, when they were living just on the other side of the Narrow Sea in a merchant’s house? Now they are farther away & surrounded by a bunch of fierce warriors who might get riled by an assassination attempt.
Robert was blinded by hatred against the Targaryans for the “dreadful” thing done to his long-lost love. (Yeah, right.) Some of his Council are just humoring him; others might be glad to encourage a Targaryan comeback. Meanwhile, he’s blind to what is happening just under his nose & his brain trust is too busy with their various plots to actually run the Kingdoms.
Pretty soon, things will blow up in ways that will make hardly anybody happy. And will make a lot of people dead.
Oh, and Winter’s Coming!
Yeah, the Mongol invasions come to mind, don’t they? But while the Mongols indeed managed to get enough troops to the Japanese Isles to be a danger, their two expeditions also highlight all the problems the Dothraki would have faced and more.
Unlike the Dothraki, the Mongols were rigorously organized, had an entire empire at their disposal and their equipment, like armor, weapons and war engines, was at the very least on a par with their opponents; their sophisticated methods of communication at all stages of a battle were exemplary.
Comparing the Mongols with the Dothraki is not flattering for the former – not that you did that, I just wanted to point out that the often made analogy doesn’t sound convincing to me.
Anyway, whenever we take a closer look at invading forces crossing the sea, we’ll see time and again that you need to fullfil a lot of requirements to do this successfully.
Control of the sea is one of the keys, the Dothraki could not achieve that – though they, or rather the Targaryen supporters, might have found the allies to do it for them.
Those supporters are the main reason why an invasion isn’t necessarily a ludicrous thought; and though I don’t think that the Dothraki were the right instrument, the breakup of the Seven Kingdoms surely is essential for any transcontinental invasion.
Which leads to a scenario that is one of the possible developments in later books and which looks a lot more plausible: an invasion with a relatively small but powerful force that will be welcomed, supported and supplied by an ally at the destination; both will fight in unison an already war-weary enemy who is disunited and bled out and whose regional authorities might be all to willing to capitulate and switch sides.
That invading army will already have a foothold that is beyond reach of the enemy, will be supplied without having to rely on shipping traffic and might even have at least an arrangement with a seafaring force that could harass the enemy, bind troops elsewhere, protect the invading ships or help them during landfall.
Oh, and the invader might have dragons. And a royal Targaryen in command.
That seems to be the monkey wrench in everyone’s plan, doesn’t it?
How did William the Conqueror’s 1066 invasion of England compare to what a Dothraki invasion might look like? At all roughly analogous?
Did you by any chance see the last remake of Robin Hood, and notice the Norman landing craft? I had no idea the Higgins boat was invented centuries ago.
Which also reminds me, are these people supposed to be a lost colony of humanity, somehow? Are they on an alternate-history earth, or are they in a whole 'nother solar system? Either way, they must be commended for hanging on so dearly to spoken English. 
I don’t think the Dothraki would have anywhere near the number of infantry that the Normans had.
There was only a couple thousand people on each side at Hastings. I dunno what percentage of the invasion force that was, but assuming it was a large chunk of it, it was a lot smaller then Robert’s feared “40,000 horsemen”.
Actually looking at wikipedia, apparenty the historical reports put the invasion force close to 20,000 men, so still smaller then the proposed fictional Dorthaki invasion, but only by a factor of two. In anycase, I don’t think an invasion of that side with medeval type tech is particularly implausible, as the earlier poster said. Granted the Dorthaki would have to find a largish naval power to team up with. William the Conqueror required some 400 boats, and only some of his troops were mounted.
Also the English Channel is a lot narrower than the Narrow Sea.
Stupid name then
You’ll have to take that up with Mr Martin I guess.
The Mongol invasion of Japan was what I thought about as well. I had a quick lookat Wiki and though it was a huge army there isn’t a mention of horses. Still it is presumably possible to ship a reasonable number of horses as well.
And as Wintertime suggests the Dothraki didn’t have to do it themselves. Any disgruntled lords in the seven kingdoms might decide to rebel and fight for a Targaryen restoration. The TV show does a good job of highlighting the fact that the king doesn’t have a standing army and has to depend on his vassals to supply forces. In the show, Robert is shown to be acutely aware of the fragility of his rule.
Incidentally as to the earlier discussion about why Robert is scared of Dany rather than Viserys, it’s quite clear that the army and real power is in the hands of Khal Drogo. He has zero incentive to help Viserys become king and that is surely understood by everyone except Viserys himself. If however his son is also a Targaryen he has a strong incentive to conquer the Seven Kingdoms and install his son as king. In fact I suspect that killing Viserys was always part of the plan to make his son the Targaryen heir.
It was doable with medieval tech to transport cavalry, the Romans had already done it, but a force of 40,000 horse men means a lot more horses than men and the Narrow Sea is pretty wide.
That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been done at all; in the 15th century, the Chinese admiral Zheng He commanded a fleet (the sources speak of 200 – 300+ ships) that had an overall ship’s complement of more than 27,000 men; the fleet included also equine ships to carry horses over the sea.
And Kublai Khan’s second strike force, that was supposed to invade Japan in 1281, consisted – as many sources say - of more than 4,000 ships, though many of them were not built for the high seas (which showed).
Chinese contemporary sources (which are, like most other sources, prone to inflate numbers shamelessly) claim that the first force, the Eastern Route fleet, of 50,000 Mongol, their horses and added Koryo troops would leave from the peninsula to retake Iki and Tsushima. They were supposed to link up there with a second force, the Southern Route Fleet, coming from southern China, that, according to those sources, consisted of 100,000 Chinese, which were defeated Southern Song troops. The combined fleets had the order to attack Japan in unison.
Such a strenght in numbers of a naval operation is highly unlikely, consider the difficulty around the D-Day operation in modern times (!), but the Mongolian force was definitely considerable.
Anyway, the Dothraki didn’t have the resources for any operation that could hope to conquer Westeros – even the Mongols failed against a comparatively weak and close opponent.
And the plans of the Targaryen supporting conspirators seem to acknowledge that an overthrow of the current ruling powers hinged much more on their preceding collapse, the liaison with allies and a readiness of some dominions to change allegiance than on overwhelming strength of an invading force.
I doubt that anyone foresaw dragons, who are portrayed as almost the equivalent of nuclear weaponry in a conflict - if we are to believe the notoriously unreliable in-story tale-tellers; but even if they are “in reality” close to useless, their psychological effect might indeed prove to be nuclear.
I always thought that too – which made me wonder, if the conspirators were uncharacteristically naive or deliberately not sacrificing Dany but Viserys to reach their goals.
Speaking of those goals – what exactly are they now that a Targaryen dynasty is out of the question (if that was the intended objective in the first place)?
Are they really all clueless about the big picture lurking in the background?
I think everyone but Viserys was perfectly willing to sacrifice Viserys to achieve their goals. Even Dany, once she got a spine.
There could still be a Targaryen dynasty - who all knows that Dany is barren? She could adopt a child if she wanted and either claim it as her own or just make it an heir. Or, she could find someone that technically has a line to the throne - the Maesters worked pretty hard to make Robert’s claim seem legitimate.
As for the ‘big picture’, assuming that you are referring to The Others and the like, well…why should anyone know about it? Stannis went to the Wall to help fight off a Wildling invasion. Nothing to do with the supernatural.
-Joe
Interesting! I never thought of that. I always had the impression that Viserys had just pushed Drogo too far and that the horse-lord finally decided to rid himself of a chronic annoyance (esp. as that annoyance had threatened his khaleesi and, by extension, his unborn son).