The Citadel and the maesters

Peremore's pets — the founding

The Citadel stands at Oldtown, in the Reach, the oldest true city of Westeros — and by the tale of its founding it began as one clever prince's hobby. Peremore the Twisted, a sickly younger son with a hungry mind, gathered about him wise men, teachers, priests, healers, singers, and wizards, whom the court mocked as 'Peremore's pets.'

When Peremore died, his brother King Uthor of the High Tower granted those scholars land beside the Honeywine so they might keep meeting and studying together. From that gift the Citadel grew into the order that now trains and chains every maester in the Seven Kingdoms.

SourcesThe World of Ice & Fire · Fire & Blood

The chain and its metals

A maester wears his learning around his throat. The chain of office is not one metal but many, each link a different substance forged when its wearer masters a separate art — so that the finished collar is a ledger of everything a man has studied, worn for life.

Valyrian steel

The link of the higher mysteries — the study of magic and sorcery, which the grey order treats with deep suspicion. Few maesters ever forge it, and those who do are watched.

Silver

The healing arts and the physician's craft, the discipline most maesters prize above the rest, for it is the one a lord's household needs most often.

Iron, gold, copper, bronze, and the rest

A link for every other discipline — warcraft, sums and coin, history, the movements of the stars — added one by one as each art is mastered. No two chains are quite alike, for no two maesters have learned quite the same things.

SourcesA Feast for Crows · The World of Ice & Fire

Archmaesters: rings, rods, and masks

Above the maesters stand the archmaesters, each the ranking master of a single art. An archmaester sets aside the mixed chain of a common maester for the tokens of his mastery: a ring, a rod, and a mask, all wrought of the metal of his discipline.

So the archmaester of the higher mysteries bears ring, rod, and mask of Valyrian steel; the master of healing, of silver; and so on through every art the Citadel keeps. The tokens are the office, and pass to whoever next holds the seat.

SourcesA Feast for Crows · The World of Ice & Fire

The Conclave

The archmaesters govern the Citadel together as the Conclave, meeting behind closed doors in a windowless chamber. It is the Conclave that raises new archmaesters, that chooses which maester shall be sent to serve as Grand Maester at the king's court, and that judges when the seasons have turned.

When the Conclave declares that winter has come — or that it has ended — the white ravens go out from Oldtown to carry the word across the realm, and the maesters in every keep make ready.

SourcesThe World of Ice & Fire · A Feast for Crows

The glass candles

Among the Citadel's oldest relics are the glass candles: candles of obsidian, black and sharp and wrought in Valyria before the Doom, said to burn with a light that casts no heat and throws strange shadows. The lore holds that a sorcerer who lights one may see across mountains and seas, speak mind to mind, and look into a man to know his lies.

For centuries the maesters set novices to lighting them as a lesson in the folly of magic, for the candles would not burn — and their darkness was taken as proof that the age of sorcery was dead and buried.

SourcesA Feast for Crows · The World of Ice & Fire

The grey conspiracy

There is a darker reading of the grey order, hedged here as the theory it is. Some within the Citadel's own walls have hinted that the maesters, reasonable and grey and mistrustful of all magic, have quietly worked for centuries to rid the world of sorcery — and that the slow death of the dragons was less an accident than a design.

The text offers whispers, not proof: a bitter word from one archmaester, a pattern a suspicious mind might trace. The maesters themselves would call it slander, and the chronicle records the charge without pronouncing it true.

SourcesA Feast for Crows

The novice from the Wall