Banker Lotho Rogare

Banker Lotho Rogare was one of the Rogare family members caught in the collapse of the Rogare Bank, a financial disaster that ruined depositors in both Lys and Westeros. His story links that transnational catastrophe to the different forms of justice imposed on the family: in King’s Landing he was punished for theft, then left the city and found a place in Oldtown under Samantha Hightower’s patronage.

Identity and Family Position

Lotho was the brother of Roggerio Rogare and a member of the family built by Lysandro the Magnificent. Though the Rogares were connected to House Targaryen by marriage, Lotho and his brother were neither kings nor princes; their lordly titles, Lord Manderly and Grand Maester Munkun concluded, were courtesies rather than grounds for exemption from prosecution. Their relationship to Prince Viserys’s wife did spare them, at least initially, the harsher conditions of the black cells after their arrest.

Arrest and the Bank’s Collapse

When news reached Westeros that the Rogare Bank had failed, lords and merchants realized that the money they had entrusted to it was lost. In King’s Landing, Lucas Leygood and the Gold Cloaks arrested Lotho as he attempted to leave the city. They seized his letters and ledgers, as well as the remaining gold and silver in the vaults atop Visenya’s Hill. His arrest was part of the wider reckoning with the Rogare family, whose collapse had despoiled people far beyond Lys.

The scale of the losses shaped the case against him. Although Lotho was not found guilty of high treason, murder, or conspiracy, he remained accused of fraud and theft. The loss of the bank’s deposits had ruined thousands in Lys and Westeros, but the distinction between family association and individual proof mattered: the evidence against Lotho was ultimately judged sufficient for theft, not for the political crimes attached to the wider crisis.

Sentence and Departure

Torrhen Manderly found Lotho guilty of taking gold, gems, and silver that did not belong to him and failing to restore them when they were demanded. He offered Lotho a choice between taking the black and having his right hand removed as the punishment for a common thief. Lotho chose the mutilation, explaining that he was left-handed. The sentence was carried out, and he departed King’s Landing short of his right hand.

His punishment stood in contrast to the harsher fate imposed on the Rogares in Lys, where the family’s ruin led to the seizure of its property and the enslavement of its members. Westerosi authorities punished Lotho for the theft they could establish, while stopping short of treating his family connection as proof that he had shared in every crime associated with the bank’s collapse.

Oldtown and the Bank of Oldtown

After leaving King’s Landing, Lotho was taken up by Samantha Hightower, the paramour of Lyonel Hightower, and returned with her to Oldtown. The Hightowers had kept their wealth out of the Rogare Bank and remained among the richest houses in Westeros. Samantha wanted to learn how to put that fortune to better use, and the Bank of Oldtown emerged from that initiative. Lotho’s presence in her household places him at the close of the Rogare financial catastrophe and alongside the rise of a new banking institution, though the account does not specify his precise role in its establishment.