A History of Maison Targaryen

Long before they ruled Westeros, the Targaryens were one dragonlord family among forty in the Freehold of Valyria — and not among the greatest of them. Their fortunes turned on a dream. Daenys, called the Dreamer, foresaw the Doom that would consume Valyria in fire and ruin, and her father Aenar the Exile heeded her, selling his holdings and removing his household and their dragons to the bleak volcanic island of Dragonstone, at the mouth of Blackwater Bay. His fellow dragonlords named him coward and thought him a fool.

Twelve years later the Doom came. In a single cataclysm the Fourteen Flames erupted, the Freehold was shattered, its cities drowned or buried, its dragonlords burned in their beds, and the mightiest civilization the world had known was gone in an afternoon. The Targaryens alone survived it, for they alone had listened to a girl's dream. For a century they held to Dragonstone at the edge of Westeros, the last dragonlords in all the world, while the ashlands of the east convulsed in the long Century of Blood — until an ambitious young man named Aegon turned his violet eyes toward the mainland.

Aegon Targaryen came ashore at the mouth of the Blackwater with his two sister-wives, Visenya and Rhaenys, three dragons, and a modest host — and in two years he made himself master of a continent that had never been one realm before. The kings of Westeros learned in turn what dragons meant. At Harrenhal, King Harren the Black and all his sons roasted inside the mightiest castle ever raised, its towers running molten. On the Field of Fire, the joined hosts of the Reach and the west, fifty-five thousand strong, broke and burned before Balerion, Vhagar, and Meraxes.

One by one the kings knelt or died. Torrhen Stark laid down his crown on the Trident; the Arryns yielded the Vale when Visenya flew a boy king for a ride upon her dragon; the Tullys turned their cloaks and were raised up for it. In the end six of the seven kingdoms bowed, and Aegon was anointed and crowned in the Starry Sept of Oldtown, where the High Septon chose faith over fire. From that crowning the maesters count the years — the Conquest is year one, and all our dates fall Before or After it.

Only Dorne defied him. Aegon and his sisters could burn the Dornish castles but never conquer the Dornish, who melted into their deserts and struck from ambush, and the First Dornish War dragged on bloody and inconclusive. Queen Rhaenys and her dragon Meraxes were lost above the Hellholt, and Aegon's wrath scorched Dorne to no lasting end. He raised the Iron Throne from the swords of his defeated enemies — a thousand blades, the singers say — and if it never sat comfortably, no king who has held it since would give it up.

Aegon's heirs held the throne, but the peace he won proved fragile. His son Aenys was gentle and irresolute, and under him the Faith of the Seven rose in armed revolt — the Faith Militant, the Warrior's Sons and Poor Fellows, who could not abide dragon kings who wed brother to sister in defiance of the gods. Aenys died with the realm aflame, and the throne passed to his half-brother Maegor.

Maegor the Cruel answered the Faith with fire and steel and earned every letter of his name. He burned the Sept of Remembrance with its defenders inside, put thousands of the faithful to the sword, and slaughtered his own kin near as readily as his enemies. He took six wives and left no living heir, and after six years of terror he was found dead upon the Iron Throne itself, its blades in his wrists — whether by his own hand or another's, no man living can say. Few mourned him.

From that bloody beginning rose the greatest of the Targaryen kings. Jaehaerys I, called the Conciliator, took the throne as a boy and held it for fifty-five years, longer than any king before or since. Where Maegor had burned, Jaehaerys reconciled: he made peace with the Faith, winning its blessing for the dragon kings' marriages in exchange for disarming its militant orders, and set the realm in order as no ruler had. With his sister-wife, Good Queen Alysanne, at his side, he built roads and harbors, reformed the laws, and flew the length of the realm — even to the Wall, where Alysanne gifted the Night's Watch new lands.

But long life brought its own curse: Jaehaerys outlived his heirs, and the succession fell into doubt. In the year 101 he summoned the lords of the realm to a Great Council at Harrenhal to choose among his descendants, and they passed over his granddaughter's line in favor of his grandson Viserys — establishing, by their vote, that the Iron Throne did not pass through the female line if a male claimant stood near. It was a fateful judgment. When the Old King died at last, full of years and honor, he left behind a realm at its height under his grandson Viserys I — and a question of inheritance that would soon set dragon against dragon.

Viserys I reigned over the golden noontide of the dynasty, a fat and easy peace — and sowed the seed of its worst catastrophe by naming his daughter Rhaenyra his heir, then siring sons by a second wife. He never resolved the contradiction, and on his death in the year 129 the court split like a struck log. The queen's faction, the greens, crowned his son Aegon II in the city; the princess's faction, the blacks, crowned Rhaenyra on Dragonstone. Both had dragons, and both meant to use them.

The war the singers named the Dance of the Dragons was the ruin of the house that waged it. It opened with the murder of a child — Blood and Cheese, sent to kill a prince in the queen's own chambers — and it never grew less terrible from there. Rook's Rest, the Gullet, the storming of the Dragonpit by a maddened mob: dragon after dragon died, some to each other, until the beasts that had made the Targaryens masters of the world were all but gone. King's Landing fell to Rhaenyra and then cast her out; she was fed living to her half-brother's dragon Sunfyre, and Aegon II was poisoned in his turn, dead in the year 131.

It ended, as told elsewhere, with a wolf holding the ashes of the capital and a broken boy raised to a throne no one had truly won. Aegon III took the crown a haunted child who had watched his mother devoured, and the realm passed into the long grey rule of regents. The dragons were dying. Within his reign the last of them, a stunted and sickly thing, would die as well — and the Targaryens, for the first time in their history, would be dragonlords with no dragons.

The dragonless century that followed was a slow reckoning with what the Targaryens were without their beasts: a family like other families, if a strange and inbred one, holding the realm by law and habit rather than fire. There were bright reigns and dark ones. The boy king Daeron I, the Young Dragon, conquered Dorne with sword and audacity at fourteen and lost it and his life before he was twenty. His successor Baelor the Blessed ruled in piety and folly. And the fat, licentious Aegon IV, the Unworthy, sowed the seeds of a century of grief by legitimizing his bastards on his deathbed — chief among them Daemon Blackfyre, who was given the ancestral Targaryen sword and, soon enough, the ambition to match it.

Dorne, which dragons could not conquer, joined the realm at last through the marriage bed: King Daeron II wed the Dornish princess Myriah, and gave his own sister to the Prince of Dorne, and so the Seven Kingdoms became truly seven at last, with Dorne keeping its own laws and its own ruler's title. But the legitimized Blackfyres tore at the dynasty for three generations. The First Blackfyre Rebellion drenched the Redgrass Field in blood; the exiled Bittersteel forged the Golden Company across the narrow sea to keep the war alive, and rebellion after rebellion followed, each a fresh wound to a house slowly bleeding out its old strength.

The last act was a tragedy of the family's own dreaming. The kindly Aegon V labored to better the smallfolk against his own lords' resistance, and near the end of his reign, at his summer castle of Summerhall, he sought to wake dragons from stone once more. Fire took the hall, and the king with it, and out of the ashes was born a prince — Rhaegar, who would carry the house to its ruin. His father Aerys II began his reign with promise and descended into madness, growing crueler and more suspicious with every passing year, until the Defiance of Duskendale broke something in him for good. When his son ran off with Lyanna Stark, the mad king burned her father and brother in his throne room, and the realm rose. Rhaegar fell to Robert's hammer on the Trident; the Sack of King's Landing ended the dynasty; and the last dragons — two frightened children — fled across the sea into exile.