House Targaryen

Baelor I Targaryen

the Blessed

Life: 144 AC
House: Targaryen

A king remembered more for piety than politics — the chronicle keeps the ending of his reign veiled for readers not yet there.

Baelor Targaryen was crowned at seventeen after his brother Daeron I died fighting in Dorne, and ruled the Seven Kingdoms less like a king than like a septon who happened to have inherited one — fasting, praying, and forgiving with a fervor the smallfolk adored and the Faith found difficult to argue with, whatever the small council privately thought of it. He walked the Boneway barefoot and in sackcloth to return Dornish hostages his brother's war had taken, personally freeing men his own family had every political reason to keep, and had the Maidenvault built inside the Red Keep to shelter — or, by a less charitable reading, imprison — his three unmarried sisters against the temptations he was convinced the court posed them.

The arc of Baelor I Targaryen

This carries the character’s road through the published novels. Read on only if you do not fear to know.

Baelor's piety curdled into something closer to obsession by the end of his reign: when his sister and former queen, Daena, bore a bastard son in 170 AC by a father the court could only guess at, Baelor took the birth as a personal failure of the sanctity he had built the Maidenvault to protect, and began a fast meant, by his own telling, to atone for it. He did not break the fast even as his body visibly failed him, and died on its forty-first day — leaving the throne, and eventually the Blackfyre cause, an unlikely gift in the bastard boy he had fasted himself to death over, a child later legitimized as Daemon Blackfyre.

Where the books leave Baelor I Targaryen: died in 171 AC, on the forty-first day of a fast he refused to break, having taken nothing but water and a little bread for the previous forty; some at court suspected poison at his Hand's hand rather than piety alone, though the Citadel treats that as rumor, not record

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 Baelor I Targaryen?

A Targaryen king renowned for extreme piety, who walked to Dorne barefoot to free hostages and imprisoned his own sisters in the Red Keep's Maidenvault to guard their chastity.

Is Baelor I Targaryen alive?

No — the chronicle need only say that a religious fast late in his reign proved his undoing; the particulars are treated in his veiled record.