Aegon's Conquest & the Dragon Kings

The age that gave the realm its throne and its very count of years. Out of the west came Aegon Targaryen and his sister-wives with three dragons, and in a war of a year and a half they welded six of the seven kingdoms into one ÔÇö beginning very nearly three centuries of dragon kings ruling from the Iron Throne.

One king, one realm

Aegon Targaryen of Dragonstone had two sisters, whom he married, and three dragons: the monstrous black Balerion, the Dread; Visenya's bronze-and-brown Vhagar; and Rhaenys's silver Meraxes. With those three beasts and a small host he landed at the mouth of the Blackwater Rush, threw up an earthwork fort where the tents had stood, and declared himself king of all Westeros. The fort would grow into King's Landing, and the count of years would begin from that landing ÔÇö everything before it reckoned BC, everything after AC.

The kings of Westeros did not surrender their crowns to an upstart with a boast, so the dragons made the argument for him. Harren the Black had just finished the vast castle of Harrenhal, and thought its walls too thick and too high for any foe; Aegon burned him alive inside them on dragonback in a single night, and Harrenhal has been a cursed ruin ever since. On the Field of Fire, the combined armies of the Reach and the West ÔÇö the largest host ever raised in Westeros to that day ÔÇö met Aegon and both his sisters, and all three dragons fought together for the only time; four thousand men burned, and the age of armies standing against dragons was over.

One by one the kings knelt or died. The King of the Rock and the Gardener King burned on the Field of Fire; the Storm King fell; the North and the Vale bent the knee rather than face the flames. Only Dorne held out ÔÇö where the Dornish refused open battle, melted into their deserts, and made the conquest so costly that Aegon eventually let them keep their independence. Crowned by the High Septon in Oldtown, Aegon had the swords of his fallen enemies gathered and, the tale says, melted and beaten by dragonfire into a savage, ugly chair of a thousand blades: the Iron Throne, meant to remind whoever sat it that a king should never sit easy.

Jaehaerys the Conciliator and the long peace

Aegon's own reign, and those of his sons Aenys and the cruel, terrible Maegor, were troubled ÔÇö Maegor especially warred against the Faith and drowned the realm in blood. But then came the longest and best reign in Targaryen history: Jaehaerys the First, the Old King, the Conciliator, and his sister-queen Alysanne. Between them they ruled for more than fifty years of peace and plenty.

Jaehaerys made his peace with the Faith of the Seven, ending the war Maegor had started; he reformed the laws of the realm, built roads and holdfasts, and let the smallfolk prosper. The dragons were at their height, the treasury was full, and the realm ÔÇö for once ÔÇö was quiet. It is the reign every later Targaryen was measured against and found wanting, the proof that the dragons could bring peace as well as fire if the hand on the reins was wise.

The seeds of the Dance

But Jaehaerys outlived his own children, and the smooth succession he had spent a lifetime securing died with them. The throne passed to his grandson, Viserys the First ÔÇö a kindly, generous, easy king who presided over another stretch of prosperity and wanted nothing so much as to be loved and left in peace.

Viserys could not, or would not, settle the single question that would matter more than all his good works: who would rule after him. He named his daughter Rhaenyra his heir and had his lords swear to her ÔÇö but then took a second wife, Alicent of House Hightower, who gave him sons. A daughter already promised the throne, and sons who by every custom of the realm should come before her: the court divided into two parties, the greens and the blacks, and spent the whole of Viserys's long reign smiling at one another and sharpening their knives. The old king died still hoping it would sort itself out. It did not.