103 AC

103 AC is the year in which Jaehaerys Targaryen died of natural causes, closing a fifty-five-year reign that began with his accession in 48 AC. Its significance lies not only in ending the rule of a king remembered as the Conciliator, but in marking the close of a long peace whose unresolved succession questions would shadow the dynasty that followed.

The End of a Long Reign

Jaehaerys came to the Iron Throne at fourteen, inheriting a realm impoverished by war and divided by the weakness of Aenys Targaryen’s rule and the cruelty of Maegor Targaryen’s. By the time his reign ended in 103 AC, he had ruled the Seven Kingdoms for fifty-five years. He was called the Old King in his later years, though much of his reign had been spent as a vigorous ruler rather than an aged one.

The chronology gives no more precise date within 103 AC for his death. It records that he died of natural causes, bringing to a close the longest and most peaceful reign enjoyed by any descendant of Aegon Targaryen. The year therefore serves as a dividing point between Jaehaerys’s extended rule and the political history that developed after it.

Succession Questions Before 103 AC

The stability of the reign did not mean that succession was free from dispute. In 92 AC, Jaehaerys’s eldest son and heir, Aemon, was killed on Tarth. The king then named Aemon’s younger brother Baelon heir to the Iron Throne, passing over Aemon’s daughter Rhaenys and the possibility that she might have a son. Baelon’s death later reopened the question of who could inherit.

In 101 AC, two years before Jaehaerys’s death, a Great Council chose Viserys Targaryen as heir. The vote was reported to have favored him by more than twenty to one, and Jaehaerys, who had not attended the council, confirmed the result by granting Viserys the title Prince of Dragonstone. Many thereafter treated the council’s decision as a precedent against a woman inheriting the Iron Throne or transmitting a claim to her male descendants. This decision formed part of the political landscape at the close of 103 AC, though the account does not present it as having resolved every future succession dispute.

Historical Significance

Later judgments place 103 AC at the end of an unusually consequential reign. Jaehaerys’s predecessors had undone much of what the Conqueror established; the realm he inherited was marked by mistrust and division. His reputation as the Conciliator rests on the work of binding the kingdoms together after that disruption. A later archmaester contrasted the Conqueror’s military achievement with Jaehaerys’s greater success in making the kingdoms one.

The year also stands at a distance from the Dance of the Dragons, fought from 129 to 131 AC. The conflict’s roots were later traced to the dynastic abundance of Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s descendants and the resulting tangle of claims. Thus 103 AC closes a reign remembered for peace, while the events of the next generation would expose how peace and a settled succession were not the same thing.