Aegon III was the son Rhaenyra Targaryen bore her uncle-husband Daemon, and he came to the Iron Throne at ten years old having watched, at an age no chronicler thinks a child should have to, the ruin the Dance of the Dragons made of both his parents. He saw his mother delivered to Aegon II's mercy and, by nearly every surviving account, fed to the dragon Sunfyre before his eyes; he lost his own young dragon, Stormcloud, in the chaos of his own flight to safety not long after. A boy who had watched dragons kill his family and eat his mother did not, understandably, grow into a man who trusted them, and the Citadel notes that no ruler before or since has come to the throne so thoroughly done with the beasts that built it.
House Targaryen
Aegon III Targaryen
Aegon the Younger
- Life
- late 120 AC
- House
- Targaryen
- Titles
- King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men · Lord of the Seven Kingdoms
- Allegiance
- House Targaryen
- Seat
- King's Landing (the Red Keep)
- Culture
- Valyrian (Targaryen)
- Religion
- The Faith of the Seven
- Notable for
- Crowned at ten in the Dance of the Dragons' wreckage; his reign saw the last dragon in Westeros die
Crowned amid the war's wreckage at ten years old — the chronicle keeps how his long, dragon-averse reign eventually ends for readers not yet there.
Key events
- late 120 ACBorn the son of Rhaenyra Targaryen and her uncle-husband, Prince Daemon Targaryen.
- c. 129 ACClaims a young dragon of his own, Stormcloud, as the Dance of the Dragons engulfs his family.
- 130 ACWitnesses his mother's capture and death at Aegon II's order, and loses Stormcloud amid his own flight to safety.
- 131 ACCrowned King at ten years old on Aegon II's death, under a regency council patched together from the war's survivors.
- c. 131 ACWed Jaehaera Targaryen, Aegon II's own daughter, as a treaty bride sealing the peace between the war's two factions.
- 134 ACRemarries, more happily, to Daenaera Velaryon after Jaehaera's death under circumstances the histories treat as suspicious.
- c. 153 ACPresides over the death of the last living dragon in Westeros, closing out the Targaryen dynasty's age of dragons within his own lifetime.
- 157 ACDies at thirty-six of a wasting illness his own maesters could never name, after twenty-six years on the throne.
Reading the character
Aegon III occupies an unusual place among Targaryen kings: a boy who inherited the Iron Throne as the direct product of the very war that took nearly everyone he loved, and who spent a reign of over two decades quietly presiding over the end of the thing that had built his dynasty's power in the first place. Where his ancestors are remembered for the dragons they rode, Aegon III is remembered for the dragon he refused to go near — a reversal the Citadel treats less as failure of nerve than as the entirely reasonable response of a child who watched dragonfire and dragon jaws take his whole family apart.
His reign is also a case study in how a kingdom rebuilds after catastrophe with the survivors it has left rather than the ones it might have preferred — a regency council of former enemies, two very different marriages meant to knit the realm back together, and a long, largely peaceful stretch of governance that the more dramatic chapters of Targaryen history tend to pass over quickly on the way to louder stories.
The arc of Aegon III Targaryen
This carries the character’s road through the published novels. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
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Who is Aegon III Targaryen?
The son of Rhaenyra and Daemon Targaryen, crowned at ten after the Dance of the Dragons killed both his parents and most of the dynasty's dragons with them.
Why is Aegon III called the Dragonbane?
Because the horrors he witnessed as a child during the Dance left him with a lifelong aversion to dragons, and the last of them died during his own reign.