A History of Casa Martell

The Martells are unlike any other great house, for the truest root of their story lies not in Westeros at all but across the narrow sea, on the banks of the mother Rhoyne. There the Rhoynar dwelt in graceful river-cities until the dragonlords of Valyria came conquering, and in the Second Spice War the Valyrians brought their dragons against Prince Garin's great host and burned it, and afterward turned the surviving Rhoynar to slavery. Rather than see her people enslaved, the warrior queen Nymeria gathered the remnants of a defeated nation — ten thousand ships, the songs say — and led them west into the sunset, seeking a land beyond the dragons' reach.

She found Dorne: harsh, dry, and divided among a hundred squabbling lords. Nymeria burned her ships upon the sand so none could dream of turning back, took the Dornish lord Mors Martell to husband, and with him welded the warring petty kingdoms into a single realm ruled from Sunspear. Six kings who defied her she sent to the Wall in chains. The Rhoynar brought their customs with them and never surrendered them — equal inheritance for daughter and son, the honored place of the paramour, the title of Prince and Princess in place of King — and stamped upon Dorne a character it has never lost.

When Aegon's dragons brought the other six kingdoms to heel, Dorne alone refused to break — not by meeting fire with fire, which no one could do, but by refusing to meet it at all. The Dornish abandoned their castles when the dragons came and struck from ambush when they left, melting into deep desert and hidden pass. Aegon and his sisters could burn Sunspear a dozen times and conquer nothing. In the fighting Queen Rhaenys and her dragon Meraxes were brought down above the Hellholt by a scorpion bolt through the eye, and the ruling Princess Meria Martell, the Yellow Toad, outlasted the Conqueror's every effort. The First Dornish War ground on and guttered out, and Dorne remained free — the one land in Westeros the dragons could not take.

It was tried again a century and a half later, when the boy king Daeron I, the Young Dragon, wrote a book about how he would conquer Dorne and then, astonishingly, did it — for a season. The conquest could not be held. The Dornish rose, cut down his garrisons, and slew the Young Dragon himself, treacherously, beneath a peace banner. Dorne had proven the same lesson twice over: it could be invaded, and even, briefly, occupied, but it could not be conquered. Its words are not a boast but a plain statement of fact.

In the end Dorne joined the Seven Kingdoms the only way it ever could — willingly, and on its own terms, through the marriage bed rather than the battlefield. King Daeron II, called the Good, wed the Dornish princess Myriah, and gave his own sister Daenerys in marriage to Prince Maron Martell, and by that double knot Dorne came peaceably into the realm at last, near two hundred years after Aegon's landing. And it came whole: the Martells kept their own laws, their Rhoynish customs, and the title of Prince of Dorne, ruling their land as no other Lord Paramount ruled his.

The marriage was not universally beloved. Many in the realm resented the favor shown to Dornishmen at Daeron's court, and that resentment helped feed the fires of the Blackfyre rebellions that scarred the following generations. But the Martells had achieved what dragons never could compel and swords never could win: a place in the Seven Kingdoms that cost them neither their laws nor their pride. They had joined the realm, and remained entirely themselves — patient, proud, and slow to forget an injury.