Ilvosi

The Ilvosi is a reputed criminal organization which operates out of Volantis which allegedly has it's roots somewhere around 310. Some believe the seeds were planted in the upheaval of Volantis's transition out of a feudalist like system economically and transitioning in to ways which were more capitalist in nature after the significant hit to the slave trade cause by Daenerys Targaryen freeing the slaves of Meereen, which occurred very near this time.

Under the old system, the nobility owned most of the land outside of the Black Walls and enforced law and order through their private armies and the Tiger Cloaks, the slave guards of the city. During the economic boom caused by the Great Reforms, the noble landowners steadily sold off or rented their lands to private citizens. As part of the Great Reforms, land could no longer be seized to settle debts, and one fifth of the land was to become private property of the common folk. After the economic boom and reform of the West End of Volantis, the land owners redistributed a large share of land to private citizens in the area.

The result was a huge boom in landowners and thus voters: With this increase in property owners and commerce came more disputes that needed settling, contracts that needed enforcing, transactions that needed oversight, and properties that needed protecting. The nobility of the Old Blood were releasing their private armies to let the Volantene government take over the job of enforcing the law so that they could use that money for investment purposes, but the freeborn Volantene officers among the Tiger Cloaks were not up to the task of policing the city due to lack of manpower: there were often very few active members of the Tiger Cloaks for the entire city due to the large use of private armies beforehand. Some areas did not have any permanent guards, only visited every few months by the Tiger Cloaks to collect malcontents, leaving criminals to operate with impunity from the law in the interim. Compounding these problems was banditry: The loss of lands by some noble families who grew overzealous in their investments, and the resulting loss of many other privileges during this time of change pushed many to turn to crime. In the face of rising crime, booming commerce, and inefficient authorities, property owners on the Western end of the city who did not have the personal wealth of the nobility turned to extralegal arbitrators and protectors.

In city areas of the Western end of town which lacked proper policing from the Tiger Cloaks, local elites responded to banditry by recruiting young men into "companies-at-arms": Different from sellswords in that they were composed of those freeborn landowners who became lost in the fray and who could trace their blood back to Old Valyria and thus considered "trusted" by many among the populace to a degree which sellsword groups were not, to hunt down thieves and negotiate the return of stolen property, in exchange for a pardon for the thieves and a fee from the victims. These companies-at-arms were sometimes made up of former officers from the Volantene military or the Tiger Cloaks, or others who, while they still carried the blood of Old Valyria, came from lower born status financially who took officer positions to raise their place in society, and usually the most skilled and violent of them. While this saved communities the massive trouble and expense of training their own forces, it may have made the companies-at-arms more inclined to collude with the criminals and bandits they policed rather than destroy them. The Dohaeriros Ryptegon, the scribes of Volantis, have said these groups are similar to the beginnings of the Ilvosi.

In 330, an officer of the Tiger Cloaks once wrote of a "sect of thieves" that operated across Volantis. The sect made "affiliates every day of the brightest young people coming from the middle class, of the guardians of the Western Side of the city, and of the large number of smugglers; a sect which gives and receives protection to and from certain men who make a living on traffic and commerce. It is a sect with little or no fear of public bodies, because its members believe that they can easily elude this." It had special signals to recognize each other, offered protection services, scorned the law and had a code of loyalty and non-interaction with the Tiger Cloaks (and frequently most other authorities) known as "daorun" (or "Nothing" in High Valyrian). The officer warned in his report that the Volantene government's brutal and clumsy attempts to crush crime only made the problem worse by alienating the populace.

The Ilvosi meddled in politics early on, bribing or bullying voters into voting for candidates they favored. At this period in history, still only a small fraction of the Volantene population could vote, so a single Ilvosi Kepa or Muna - Valyrian words for "father" or "mother", which the Ilvosi use to some degree for a designation of rank structure - could control a sizable chunk of the electorate and thus wield considerable political leverage. The Ilvosi used their allies in government to avoid prosecution as well as persecute less well-connected rivals. The highly fragmented and shaky Volantene political system at the time allowed cliques of Ilvosi-friendly politicians to exert quite a lot of influence.

The Ilvosi are reputed to engage in numerous criminal activities that included kidnappings for ransom, smuggling, murder, robbery, extortion, torture, and other such illicit activities. The Ilvosi are also rumored to maintain funds to support the families of imprisoned or otherwise disadvantaged members and take care of any other necessities for them via their vast alleged political pull.