The Seven Kingdoms of Old

The long middle age of the world, after the heroes and before the dragons. In it the Andals crossed the narrow sea with iron and the Faith of the Seven, Nymeria led ten thousand ships to Dorne, the many kingdoms of Westeros took the shapes the Conqueror would find ÔÇö and across the sea, the greatest empire the world has known rose on dragonback and then died in a single night.

The Andals and the Seven

Some thousands of years after the Long Night ÔÇö the maesters cannot agree how many, and the number keeps shrinking as they argue ÔÇö a new people crossed the narrow sea from Essos: the Andals, taller and fairer than the First Men, armed with iron rather than bronze, mounted and mailed as knights, and carrying a new religion, the Faith of the Seven. They carved seven-pointed stars into their own flesh to show their devotion, and they came to conquer.

Kingdom by kingdom the Andals overran the south. They put the children of the forest to the sword and the axe wherever they found them, and cut down the weirwoods, until the old race vanished entirely from the lands below the Neck. They toppled or married into the First Men kings, and their seven gods and their knightly ways became the way of the south. Only the North held them off: the Kings of Winter guarded the narrow neck of the land, and behind it the old gods and the old blood endured, which is why the North still feels a country apart.

The kingdoms take shape

Out of the long grinding of these wars, the countless petty kingdoms slowly gathered into the great realms the songs remember. In the North, the Starks ÔÇö the Kings of Winter ÔÇö ground down their rivals and ruled from Winterfell. In the west, the golden Lannister Kings of the Rock; in the Reach, the Gardener Kings at Highgarden; in the stormlands, the Durrandon Storm Kings at Storm's End; in the Vale, the Arryn Kings of Mountain and Vale; on the Iron Islands, kings chosen and crowned in salt and rock; and along the Trident a shifting crown of river kings, forever conquered by one greater neighbour or another.

None of these kingdoms was ever safe. They warred on each other endlessly, borders sliding back and forth over centuries, until the map was a patchwork of old grudges. That endless, evenly-matched squabbling is exactly why three dragons could later swallow the whole of it so quickly: there was no unity to break, only a knot of rival kings who would rather see a neighbour humbled than stand together.

Nymeria and the Rhoynar

Dorne became different from all the rest, and the reason has a name: Nymeria. When the Valyrian Freehold's dragons pushed westward and conquered the cities of the Rhoyne, the warrior-queen Nymeria gathered the survivors of her people ÔÇö ten thousand ships, the tale says ÔÇö and fled across the sea rather than be enslaved. She landed in Dorne, and then burned every ship behind her, so that her people would understand there was no going back.

She wed Mors Martell of the sandy Dornish coast, and together they united the warring Dornish lords under one rule at Sunspear. The Rhoynar brought their own law, their own gods, and their own customs, and mingled them with the First Men and Andals already there ÔÇö which is why Dornishmen let daughters inherit before younger sons, why they are darker and hotter-blooded than their neighbours reckon proper, and why, alone of all the kingdoms, Dorne would one day tell Aegon the Conqueror and his dragons to keep out.

Valyria and its Doom

All the while, across the narrow sea and far to the east, the true power of the age was rising. From a peninsula of volcanoes called the Fourteen Flames, the Valyrian Freehold tamed dragons and bent the world to them ÔÇö conquering the old Ghiscari Empire and salting its cities, breaking the Rhoynar, and spreading Valyrian blood, Valyrian steel, and Valyrian sorcery from Slaver's Bay to the edge of Westeros. For five thousand years no power could stand against a people who rode dragons.

Then, in a single catastrophic night roughly a century before the Conquest, the Fourteen Flames erupted together and the Doom took Valyria ÔÇö every hill for hundreds of miles blown apart, the land drowned and poisoned, the dragonlords and their dragons and the secret of their steel all swallowed at once. What caused it, no one living knows. But twelve years before the Doom, one lesser dragonlord family, warned by a daughter's prophetic dream, had sold up and moved west to a bleak island fortress on the edge of the Seven Kingdoms. When the Freehold burned, they were among the only dragonlords left in the world. Their name was Targaryen, and their island was Dragonstone.