‘Game Of Thrones’ News: Is The Battle of the Bastards Based On A Historical Battle?

The recent bloody fight scene in "Game of Thrones" Season 7 was actually based on a real, historical Roman war.

In "Battle of the Bastards", Director Miguel Sapochnik magnificently pulled off something truly remarkable by executing a battle scene that was entirely both massive in scope and incredibly personal as cited on IGN. Showrunners D.B. Wei and David Benioff said it was in fact a difficult feat that they could hardly find great examples of something similar in film.

Sapochnik explained that he looked to history for inspiration just to come up with the best face off between the bastards, Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton. So he turned to the Battle of Cannae between the Hannibal-led Carthaginians and the Romans in 216 BCE.

The Carthage defeated the Roman army in that ancient battle by circling their enemies through a double envelopment just like in the Game of Thrones Season 7 Battle of the Bastards episodeas cited in a news article on Time .

The historical battle during the Second Punic War took place near the ancient village of Cannae about 300 miles south of Rome. According to Dickinson College Commentaries, the sadi village had a granary key to supplying food to Romans and was able to control the approaches to southern Italy.

The showrunners' goal, moreover, was to place Game of Thrones fans into the thick of the battle while portraying clashing armies in a way they had not done up until this point. "From the beginning we knew that one thing we'd never had on the show was a true medieval pitched battle where two sides bring all the forces they can into play in some battlefield that's somehow negotiated or agreed upon and they go at each other until one of them wins and the other one loses," said Weiss in a statement. "This is a staple of human history, and we started to look through film samples of it. There really wasn't one that both made you feel what it was like to be there on the ground and gave you a sense of the geography of the battle," he proudly remarked.