In the House of the Dragon adaption, King Viserys reminded Otto Hightower that his father,
Baelon, had been a hale and healthy warrior.
A dragon rider at the peak of his abilities.
King Jaehaerys had named Baelon as his hand, and to celebrate that, Jaehaerys had called
for a great hunt.
“Five days later my...
my father lay dead.”
In this video, we are going to go over the full life of Baelon Targaryen otherwise known
as the Spring Prince and Baelon the Brave.
In 57 AC, Jaehaerys and his queen found cause to rejoice again when the gods blessed them
with another son.
Baelon, he was named, after one of the Targaryen lords who had ruled Dragonstone before the
Conquest, himself a second son.
Though smaller than his brother, Aemon, at birth, the new babe was louder and lustier,
and his wet nurses complained that they had never known a child to suck so hard.
Only two days before his birth, the white ravens had flown from the Citadel to announce
the arrival of spring, so Baelon was immediately dubbed the Spring Prince.
Baelon’s older brother, Aemon, was just two years older than him.
As the children grew, Grand Maester Benifer watched them closely.
The wounds left by the enmity between the Conqueror’s sons, Aenys and Maegor, were
still fresh in the minds of many older lords, and Benifer worried lest these two boys likewise
turn on one another to bathe the realm in blood.
He need not have been concerned.
Save mayhaps for twins, no brothers could ever have been closer than the sons of Jaehaerys
Targaryen.
As soon as he grew old enough to walk, Baelon followed his brother, Aemon, everywhere, and
tried his best to imitate him in everything he did.
When Aemon was given his first wooden sword to begin his training in arms, Baelon was
judged to be too young to join him, but that did not stop him.
He made his own sword from a stick and rushed into the yard anyway to begin whacking at
his brother, reducing their master-at-arms to help less laughter.
Thereafter Baelon went everywhere with his stick-sword, even to bed, to the despair of
his mother and her maids.
Prince Aemon was shy around the dragons at first, Benifer observed, but not so Baelon,
who reportedly smote Balerion on the snout the first time he entered the Dragonpit.
“He’s either brave or mad, that one,” old Sour Sam observed, and from that day forth
the Spring Prince was also known as Baelon the Brave.
In 62 AC, the lords of the Seven Kingdoms rejoiced when King Jaehaerys conferred upon
his eldest the title Prince of Dragonstone, making him the acknowledged heir to the Iron
Throne.
He still trained every morning in the yard with Prince Baelon; the two brothers were
fast friends, and evenly matched.
Aemond was taller and stronger, Baelor quicker and fiercer.
Their contests were so spirited that they oft drew crowds of onlookers.
Serving men and washerwomen, household knights and squires, maesters and septons and stableboys,
they would gather in the yard to cheer on one prince or the other.
As the years went by, Baelon continued to follow in the footsteps of his older brother.
Wherever Prince Aemon went, whatever Prince Aemon did, Prince Baelon would not be far
behind.
The truth of that was proved in 73 AC, when Baelon the Brave followed his brother into
knighthood.
Aemon had won his spurs at seventeen, so Baelon did the same at sixteen, traveling across
the Reach to Old Oak, where Lord Oakheart was celebrating the birth of a son with seven
days of jousting.
Arrayed as a mystery knight and calling himself the Silver Fool, the young prince overthrew
Lord Rowan, Ser Alyn Ashford, both Fossoway twins, and Lord Oakheart’s own heir, Ser
Denys, before falling to Ser Rickard Redwyne.
After helping him to his feet, Ser Rickard unmasked him, bade him kneel, and knighted
him on the spot.
Prince Baelon lingered only long enough to partake of the feast that evening before galloping
back to King’s Landing to complete his quest and become a dragonrider.
Never one to be overshadowed, he had long since chosen the dragon he wished to mount,
and now he claimed her.
Unridden since the death of the Dowager Queen Visenya twenty-nine years before, the great
she-dragon Vhagar spread her wings, roared, and launched herself once more into the skies,
carrying the Spring Prince across Blackwater Bay to Dragonstone to surprise his brother
Aemon and Caraxes.
In breeding, as in so much else, Baelon the Brave was not far behind his brother Aemon.
In 75 AC, Princess Alyssa was married to her older brother Baelon.
The princess was fifteen, the groom eighteen.
Unlike their father and mother, Baelon and Alyssa did not wait to consummate their union;
the bedding that followed their wedding feast was the source of much ribald humor in the
days that followed, for the young bride’s sounds of pleasure could be heard all the
way to Duskendale, men said.
Prince Baelon had not ceased smiling since his marriage.
When not aloft, Baelon and Alyssa spent every hour together, most oft in their bedchamber.
Prince Baelon was a lusty lad, for those same shrieks of pleasure that had echoed through
the halls of the Red Keep on the night of their bedding were heard many another night
in the years that followed.
And soon enough, the much-hoped-for result appeared, and Alyssa Targaryen grew great
with child.
In 77 AC she gave her brave prince a son they named Viserys.
Septon Barth described the boy as a “plump and pleasant lad, who laughed more than any
babe I’ve ever known, and nursed so lustily he drank his wet nurse dry.”
Against all advice, his mother clapped the boy in swaddling clothes, strapped him to
her chest, and took him aloft on Meleys when he was just nine days old.
Afterward she claimed Viserys had giggled the whole time.
In 81 AC, Prince Aemon reached his twenty-sixth nameday.
He had proved himself more than able in both war and peace.
As the heir apparent to the Iron Throne, it was felt desirable that he take a greater
role in the governance of the realm as a member of the king’s council.
Accordingly, King Jaehaerys named the prince his justiciar and master of laws in place
of Rodrik Arryn.
“I will leave the making of law to you, brother,” Prince Baelon declared, whilst
drinking to Prince Aemon’s appointment.
“I would sooner make sons.”
And that was just what he did, for later that same year Princess Alyssa bore her Spring
Prince a second son, who was given the name Daemon.
His mother, irrepressible as ever, took the babe into the sky on Meleys within a fortnight
of his birth, just as she had done with his brother, Viserys.
The 83rd year after Aegon’s Conquest is remembered as the year of the Fourth Dornish
War … better known amongst the smallfolk as Prince Morion’s Madness, or the War of
the Hundred Candles.
King Jaehaerys and his sons Aemon and Baelon were dragonriders.
Vermithor, Caraxes, and Vhagar fell on Morion’s fleet as it beat its way across the Sea of
Dorne.
Shouts rang out, and the Dornish filled the air with scorpion bolts, but firing at a dragon
is one thing, and killing it quite another.
A few bolts glanced off the scales of the dragons, and one punched through Vhagar’s
wing, but none of them found any vulnerable spots as the dragons swooped and banked and
loosed great blasts of fire.
One by one the ships went up in gouts of flame.
They were still burning when the sun went down, “like a hundred candles floating on
the sea.”
That is why the Fourth Dornish War is also known as the War of the Hundred Candles.
The Fourth Dornish War was fought and won in a single day.
Back in King’s Landing, King Jaehaerys and his sons received a riotous welcome.
Even Aegon the Conqueror had never won a war without losing a man.
Prince Baelon had another cause for celebration as well.
His wife, Alyssa, was again with child.
This time, he told his brother Aemon, he was praying for a girl.
Princess Alyssa was brought to bed again in 84 AC.
After a long and difficult labor, she gave Prince Baelon a third son, a boy they named
Aegon, after the Conqueror.
“They call me Baelon the Brave,” the prince told his wife at her bedside, “but you are
far braver than me.
I would sooner fight a dozen battles than do what you’ve just done.”
Alyssa laughed at him.
“You were made for battles.
I was made for this.
Viserys and Daemon and Aegon, that’s three.
As soon as I am well, let’s make another.
I want to give you twenty sons.
An Army of your own!”
Unfortunately, it was not to be.
Alyssa Targaryen had a warrior’s heart in a woman’s body, and her strength failed
her.
She never fully recovered from Aegon’s birth, and died within the year at only four-and-twenty.
Nor did Prince Aegon long survive her.
He perished half a year later, still shy of his first nameday.
Though shattered by his loss, Baelon took solace in the two strong sons that she had
left him, Viserys and Daemon, and never ceased to honor the memory of his sweet lady with
the broken nose and mismatched eyes.
Two years later, Baelon’s younger sister, Viserra, slipped past Baelon’s guards into
his bedchamber.
She disrobed and waited for him, making free with the prince’s wine whilst she lingered.
When Prince Baelon finally appeared, he found her drunk and naked in his bed and sent her
on her way.
The princess was so unsteady that she required the help of two maids and a knight of the
Kingsguard to get her safely back to her own apartments.
Not long after the incident in Baelon’s bedchamber, Viserra was found dead in an alley
at the foot of Aegon’s High Hill.
Prince Baelon was greatly distraught, wondering if he should have spoken to his sister less
brusquely that night he found her naked in his bed.
In 92 AC, a Myrish faction landed on Tarth and took the Evenstar by surprise.
In a short time they had taken the entire eastern side of the island.
Baelon’s older brother, Aemon, flew down to Tarth to discuss battle plans with Lord
Cameron, the Evenstar of Tarth.
Unfortunately, their hidden camp was found, and Prince Aemon was shot through the neck
by a Myrish crossbow bolt.
How can my words tell of the grief that swept the Seven Kingdoms then, of the pain felt
by King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne, of Lady Jocelyn’s empty bed and bitter tears, and
the way Princess Rhaenys wept to know that her father would never hold the child she
was carrying?
Far easier to speak of Prince Baelon’s wroth, and how he came down upon Tarth on Vhagar,
howling for vengeance.
The Myrish ships burned as Prince Morion’s ships had burned nine years earlier, and when
the Evenstar and Lord Boremund descended on them from the mountains, they had nowhere
to fly.
They were cut down by the thousands and left to rot along the beaches, so every wave that
washed ashore for days was tinged with pink.
Baelon the Brave played his part in the slaughter, with Dark Sister in his hand.
When he returned to King’s Landing with his brother’s corpse, the smallfolk lined
the streets screaming his name and hailing him as a hero
But it is said that when he saw his mother again, he fell into her arms and wept.
“I slew a thousand of them,” he said, “but it will not bring him back.”
And the queen stroked his hair and said, “I know, I know.”
King Jaehaerys embraced him and named him Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron
Throne.
The king’s decision to name Baelon as his heir was in accord with well-established practice.
Aegon the Conqueror had been the first Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, not his sister Visenya,
two years his elder.
Jaehaerys himself had followed his usurping uncle Maegor despite his sister Rhaena being
older.
But Jaehaerys did not make his decision lightly; he is known to have discussed the matter with
his small council.
Undoubtedly he consulted Septon Barth, as he did on all important matters, and the views
of Grand Maester Elysar were given much weight as well.
All were in accord.
Baelon, a seasoned knight of thirty-five, was better suited for rule than the eighteen-year-old
Princess Rhaenys or her unborn babe (who might or might not be a boy, whereas Prince Baelon
had already sired two healthy sons, Viserys and Daemon).
The love of the commons for Baelon the Brave was also cited.
Some dissented.
Rhaenys herself was the first to raise objection.
“You would rob my son of his birthright,” she told the king, with a hand upon her swollen
belly.
Her husband, Corlys Velaryon, was so wroth that he gave up his admiralty and his place
on the small council and took his wife back to Driftmark.
Lady Jocelyn of House Baratheon, Rhaenys’s mother, was also angered, as was her formidable
brother, Boremund, Lord of Storm’s End.
The most prominent dissenter was Good Queen Alysanne, who had helped her husband rule
the Seven Kingdoms for many years, and now saw her son’s daughter being passed over
because of her sex.
“A ruler needs a good head and a true heart,” she famously told the king.
“A cock is not essential.
If Your Grace truly believes that women lack the wit to rule, plainly you have no further
need of me.”
And thus Queen Alysanne departed King’s Landing and flew to Dragonstone on her dragon
Silverwing.
She and King Jaehaerys remained apart for two years, the period of estrangement recorded
in the histories as the Second Quarrel.
Seasons came and went in the years that followed.
There were hot days and warm days and days when the salt wind blew bracing off the sea.
There were fields of flowers in the spring, bountiful harvests, and golden autumn afternoons.
All across the realm the roads crept onward, and new bridges spanned old streams.
The king took no pleasure in any of it, so far as men could tell.
“It is always winter now,” he said to Septon Barth one night, when he had drunk
too much.
Since Aemon’s death, he always drank a cup or three of honeyed wine at night to help
him to sleep.
In 93 AC, Prince Baelon’s eldest son, Viserys, was wed to Lady Aemma of House Arryn, the
eleven-year-old child of the late Princess Daella (their marriage was not consummated
until the bride flowered, two years later).
Also that year, Prince Baelon’s sixteen-year-old son, Viserys, entered the Dragonpit and claimed
Balerion.
The old dragon had stopped growing at last, but he was sluggish and heavy and hard to
rouse, and he struggled when Viserys urged him up into the air.
The young prince flew thrice around the city before landing again.
He had intended to fly to Dragonstone, he told his father afterward, but he did not
think the Black Dread had the strength for it.
Less than a year later, Balerion was gone.
“The last living creature in all the world who saw Valyria in its glory,” wrote Septon
Barth.
In 97 AC, Baelon’s second son, Daemon, took to wife Lady Rhea of House Royce, heir to
the ancient castle of Runestone in the Vale.
In 98 AC, a great tourney was held at King’s Landing to celebrate the fiftieth year of
King Jaehaerys’s reign.
The final tilt, wherein the Kingsguard knights Ser Ryam Redwyne and Ser Clement Crabb broke
thirty lances against each other before King Jaehaerys proclaimed them co-champions, was
declared to be the finest display of jousting ever seen in Westeros.
A fortnight after the tourney’s end, however, the king’s old friend Septon Barth died
peacefully in his sleep after serving ably as Hand of the King for forty-one years.
Jaehaerys chose the Lord Commander of his Kingsguard to take his place, but Ser Ryam
Redwyne was no Septon Barth, and his undoubted prowess with a lance proved of little use
to him as Hand.
“Some problems cannot be solved by hitting them with a stick,” Grand Maester Allar
famously observed.
His Grace had no choice but to remove Ser Ryam after only a year in office.
He turned to his son Baelon to replace him, and in 99 AC the Prince of Dragonstone became
the King’s Hand.
Good Queen Alysanne had loved her children.
No mother ever loved a child more, Grand Maester Benifer once told her, before the Shivers
carried him away.
In the last days of her life, Queen Alysanne reflected on his words.
“He was wrong, I think,” she wrote, “for surely the Mother Above loved my children
more.
She took so many of them away from me.”
“No mother should ever have to burn her child,” the queen had said at the funeral
pyre of her son Valerion, but of the thirteen children she bore to King Jaehaerys, only
three of them would survive her, and only Baelon the Brave remained near her till the
end.
Saera still lived somewhere in Volantis, but she was dead to Jaehaerys, and the letters
Alysanne sent her secretly from time to time all went unanswered.
Vaegon was an archmaester at the Citadel.
A cold and distant son, he had grown to be a cold and distant man.
He wrote, as a son ought, and his words were dutiful, but there was no warmth to them,
and it had been years since Alysanne had last seen his face.
Only Baelon the Brave remained near her till the end.
Her Spring Prince visited her as often as he could and always won a smile from her,
but Baelon was the Prince of Dragonstone, Hand of the King, forever coming and going,
sitting at his father’s side at council, and treating with lords.
“You will be a great king, even greater than your father,” Alysanne had told him
the last time they were together.
She did not know.
How could she of known?
Alysanne Targaryen died on Dragonstone on the first day of the seventh moon in 100 AC,
a full century after Aegon’s Conquest.
She was sixty-four years old.
Prince Baelon, Prince of Dragonstone and Heir to the Iron Throne, performed his duties as
hand admirably; though less scholarly than Septon Barth, the prince proved a good judge
of men, and surrounded himself with loyal subordinates and counselors.
The realm would be well ruled when Baelon Targaryen sat the Iron Throne, lords and common
folk agreed.
Unfortunately, I t was not to be.
In 101 AC Prince Baelon complained of a stitch in his side whilst hunting in the kingswood.
The pain worsened when he returned to the city.
His belly swelled and hardened, and the pain grew so severe it left him bedridden.
Runciter, the new Grand Maester only recently arrived from the Citadel after Allar was felled
by a stroke, was able to bring the prince’s fever down somewhat and give him some relief
from agony with milk of the poppy, but his condition continued to worsen.
On the fifth day of his illness, Prince Baelon died in his bedchamber in the Tower of the
Hand with his father sitting beside him, holding his hand.
“Baelon the Brave, rider of Vhagar, heir to the Iron Throne... dead of a burst belly.”