Pentos

Free City of merchant princes

A wealthy Free City of canals and colored domes, where magisters grow rich and keep their daggers hidden.

The fuller tale

Pentos spreads along its bay in tiers of colored domes and slim brick towers, a merchant city that perfumes its air, waters its gardens, and prefers never to fight anyone it can pay. It is ruled, nominally, by a prince chosen by the magisters — a splendid figure who opens each new year by deflowering the maidens of field and sea, and whose other constitutional duty is starker: if a crop fails or a war is lost, the magisters cut his throat and choose a fresh prince. Real power stays with the forty-odd families who elect him, men like Illyrio Mopatis who measure their standing in warehouses. Defeated in old wars with Braavos, Pentos signed away its slaves and its warships; the magisters keep both anyway, calling the one “free bondsmen” and the other “merchant convoys,” and everyone agrees not to check.

The whole saga opens under a Pentoshi roof. It is in Illyrio’s manse that Viserys Targaryen sells his sister to Khal Drogo for the promise of an army, and on the terrace above the bay that Daenerys — thirteen in the books, mercifully older on screen — is dressed, appraised and traded. Her wedding on the plain outside the walls delivers the story its three petrified dragon eggs, a gift of Illyrio’s whose generosity has never quite added up: the magister gives away a kingdom’s ransom the way other men tip a groom, and readers have been auditing his motives ever since.

The city is the tale’s favorite back door. Varys ships Tyrion out of King’s Landing in a crate and decants him in Illyrio’s manse, where the dwarf drinks his grief among another man’s riches before turning east toward Daenerys — and in the books that turn runs through the story’s largest buried conspiracy. Illyrio and Varys, it emerges, have spent years grooming a hidden claimant: a blue-haired boy on a river barge called Young Griff, raised to believe he is Rhaegar’s son Aegon, saved from the Sack as an infant. Whether the boy is what his handlers claim is one of the novels’ open wounds; either way, the cheesemonger of Pentos has been playing a far longer game than the one Daenerys was sold into.

Pentos is where the story keeps its ledger of beginnings. Daenerys leaves it a chattel and spends the rest of the tale refusing to be one; Tyrion leaves it a self-described drunken murderer and arrives at the other end of Essos a queen’s Hand. The city itself never changes at all — which is rather the point. The magisters’ Pentos, comfortable, complicit and endlessly for sale, is the world the story’s travelers are all, in their different ways, trying to leave.

The page and the screen

The show keeps Pentos as a waypoint and cuts its deepest secret: there is no Young Griff, no Golden Company plot hatched over Illyrio’s table, and the magister himself dwindles to a cameo. Tyrion’s road east is correspondingly shortened — on screen Varys simply carts him to Volantis, while in the books he leaves Pentos down the Rhoyne in the company of the conspiracy itself, sharing a barge with a hidden prince he is not supposed to recognize.

The chronicle here

In Pentos, Viserys weds his sister Daenerys to Khal Drogo for the promise of an army. (S1·E1)
Tyrion arrives in Pentos in a crate; Varys offers him a queen worth serving. (S5·E1)
In Illyrio's manse in Pentos, Viserys dresses his sister for sale; Daenerys meets Khal Drogo and learns her wedding will buy her brother an army. (AGOT 4)