The Battle of the Trident

A warhammer, a breastplate of rubies, and the end of a dynasty in a river ford.

Why it came to this

The rebellion began as a private outrage and became a war because the king could not stop escalating it. Rhaegar Targaryen took Lyanna Stark; her brother and father went to KingÔÇÖs Landing for justice and were destroyed by Aerys II in a manner that horrified even his own court; Aerys then demanded the heads of two more young lords from their guardian, Jon Arryn, and Jon Arryn raised his banners instead. That is four of the seven kingdoms in rebellion inside a season, and it happened not because the realm was ideologically opposed to the Targaryens but because the king kept giving people no third option.

For the first year the rebels were badly placed. Robert Baratheon was cut off in the south and won several sharp fights he should not have had to fight; the crown very nearly had him at Stoney Sept and did not, because a riverlands army arrived in time and because a town full of people was willing to hide him. That failure had a price: Aerys blamed his commander, dismissed him, and replaced a competent man with a series of appointments made for loyalty. After Stoney Sept the rebel factions ÔÇö stormlands, north, Vale and riverlands ÔÇö joined into one host, and the war acquired a shape.

That left the loyalists needing a decisive field battle and needing it soon, because time was running against them. Prince Rhaegar had returned from wherever he had been in the south, taken command of the royal army himself, and marched north to fight it. He had reason to want the matter settled personally: the war was about him, whatever else it had become, and he had a father in KingÔÇÖs Landing whose behaviour was making the crownÔÇÖs position worse every week that it continued.

Both hosts converged on the crossings of the Trident, which is where any army moving between the north and the south of Westeros has to go. If the rebels won they were between the royal army and the capital with nothing in the way. If Rhaegar won, the rebellionÔÇÖs entire leadership was on one field and could be destroyed in one afternoon.

The ground and the hosts

The battle took its name from a ford on the Trident and was fought in and around the crossing itself ÔÇö shallow, wide, with the water running past a stony bed, and a good deal of the fighting done ankle- and knee-deep. A contested river crossing is one of the few pieces of ground in warfare that genuinely rewards the defender, because men in water cannot hold formation, cannot use a shield wall properly and can be shot at while doing neither. Both armies understood this. Neither could avoid the ford, because the ford was the only thing worth having.

The royal host was the larger of the two and was drawn from the Crownlands, the Reach and Dorne, with a contingent of Dornish spears under Prince Lewyn Martell ÔÇö present partly out of loyalty and partly because the MartellsÔÇÖ princess and her children were in the Red Keep and everybody understood what that meant. Ser Barristan Selmy of the Kingsguard rode with them. Rhaegar commanded the centre and the household in person.

The rebel host was a coalition of four regional armies that had been separate armies until a few weeks earlier: RobertÔÇÖs stormlanders, Eddard StarkÔÇÖs northmen, Jon ArrynÔÇÖs knights of the Vale and Hoster TullyÔÇÖs rivermen, the last of them fighting over their own ground. Coalitions of that kind usually handle badly, and this one held together because all four commanders had known each other for years and because Robert Baratheon in the field had a gift for making men want to be near him.

Neither sideÔÇÖs numbers survive in any form worth quoting. Both hosts were among the largest raised since the Dance, and the loyalists are generally reckoned to have had the advantage in weight and in heavy horse. The forces that matter for the outcome, though, were two men in the middle of it, and everyone on that field knew before it started that the day would probably come down to whether they found each other.

How it was fought

It opened as a straightforward fight for the crossing and was murderous from the first hour. Men went into the water and were held there. Neither side could establish itself on the far bank in strength for a long time, and the fighting worked back and forth across the ford in a way that produced heavy loss without producing progress. The chroniclers pass over this phase quickly because it is not interesting, which is a shame, since it is where most of the dying happened.

The wings held. This is the fact that made the rest of the day possible. On the loyalist right and centre the royal army fought well and the Dornish under Prince Lewyn held their ground longer than anyone had a right to expect from a contingent whose loyalty was, at best, purchased with hostages. On the rebel side the northmen and the Valemen kept their formations on ground that made formations nearly impossible. Because neither flank collapsed, neither commander could win by manoeuvre, and both of them were pushed toward the middle.

Then Robert Baratheon and Rhaegar Targaryen found each other in the ford, and every account of the battle collapses to that one point, which is both a distortion and the truth. It is a distortion because a battle of that size is not decided by two men, and the truth because this one was.

The two of them were not evenly matched in the way the songs suggest. Rhaegar was a very good knight, trained to the highest standard of the age, competent with a sword and generally reckoned the better technician. Robert was something else ÔÇö enormously strong, entirely without fear, and fighting with an antique weapon that nobody sensible used any more because it was heavy, clumsy and only good for one thing. A warhammer does not need to find a gap in plate. It does not care about plate at all. It transfers the whole of a very large manÔÇÖs strength through a small area of steel and lets the steel do the rest.

They fought in the water, on foot and in armour, in a river with the rest of the battle going on around them. Rhaegar had come to the field wearing his houseÔÇÖs black armour with rubies worked into the breastplate in the shape of a three-headed dragon, which is a thing you do when you expect to be recognised at a distance and when you have some notion of yourself as the last word in an argument. Robert put the hammer into the middle of it. The breastplate failed, the rubies came out of their settings, and they went into the river and downstream. Men were still finding them in the shallows years afterwards, which is why nobody has called it anything but the ruby ford since.

Whatever else the royal army had, it did not have a second plan. The centre broke where its commander had been standing, and the collapse ran outward along the line from there. Once a river-crossing fight breaks, it breaks completely, because the losing side has to retreat through the water it has just spent the day standing in.

Robert had been hurt badly enough in the exchange that he could not lead the pursuit, and Eddard Stark took the host on. It was pursued hard, and the royal army did not reform. Ser Barristan Selmy was taken off the field with wounds that should have finished him and was carried, unconscious, into the rebel camp ÔÇö where Robert, told who it was, gave orders to have him treated rather than hanged, which is one of the more revealing decisions of RobertÔÇÖs life and one he made without appearing to think about it.

What it cost

The Trident was expensive on both sides in a way the histories tend to skate over because the outcome was so dramatic. It was a full-scale field battle between the two largest hosts in the realm, fought over a river, and settled at close quarters over most of a day. Tens of thousands were engaged and the loss was proportionate. No trustworthy count exists.

The loyalist command was destroyed as a body ÔÇö two of the Kingsguard among them. The Dornish contingent, which had been sent north essentially at knifepoint, was cut up badly enough that DorneÔÇÖs account of the war afterwards begins with a grievance and only gets worse from there. Ser Barristan Selmy was one of the few of that company to be carried off the field alive.

The house ruined was the royal house, though it took another few weeks to become obvious. Every man who might have organised a defence of the capital was on that field, and after it there was no royal army left in the field anywhere between the Trident and KingÔÇÖs Landing.

The men made were the rebel commanders, in ways that shaped the next twenty years: Robert became a king, Eddard Stark became the man who took the host south and had to live with what he found there, Jon Arryn became the Hand who actually ran the realm, and Hoster TullyÔÇÖs house went from a border power to kin of the new regime.

What it changed

It ended a dynasty that had held the Iron Throne since AegonÔÇÖs Conquest, and it did so at a stroke rather than by attrition. Three hundred years of Targaryen rule finished in a river in the space of an afternoon, and the men who did it had gone to war a year earlier over a kidnapping and a murder, with no programme of any kind for what came next. A great deal of what goes wrong in the following two decades comes from that: the rebellion won a battle and then had to invent a government.

It also fixed the two facts the rest of the saga argues about. First, RobertÔÇÖs claim to the throne rested on having won it, with a thin Targaryen descent produced afterwards as decoration, which meant the throne was now something that could be taken by whoever could take it ÔÇö and every claimant in the War of the Five Kings knows that. Second, the question of what Rhaegar and Lyanna actually were to each other was never answered on that field, and the entire main story is downstream of the answer.

The Trident is the hinge. Nearly every character in the saga is either a consequence of that day, a survivor of it, or engaged in trying to undo it.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Rhaegar Targaryen died in the ford. The accounts that claim to know say he spoke a womanÔÇÖs name as he went down, and that the name was not his wifeÔÇÖs ÔÇö a detail that meant nothing to the men who reported it at the time and everything to the people who worked out what it implied, many years later.

Prince Lewyn Martell of the Kingsguard was killed on the field, and Dorne has never regarded its involvement in the war as voluntary. Ser Jonothor Darry fell with him. Ser Barristan Selmy, gravely wounded, was spared and pardoned by Robert, and served the new regime for seventeen years.

Robert was wounded badly enough that Eddard Stark led the march on KingÔÇÖs Landing without him. What Ned found when he arrived ended their friendship for a time and never fully healed it, and it sent him south again alone, to a tower in the Dornish mountains, for reasons he explained to no one for the rest of his life.

RhaegarÔÇÖs wife and children were still in the Red Keep. What happened to them is the subject of the next entry.