Citadel Conclave

The Citadel Conclave is the assembly of Oldtown’s archmaesters, the learned authorities in the great disciplines whose knowledge the crown could call upon but whose decisions were shaped by the same upheavals that afflicted the realm. Its creation of the Grand Maester’s office established a formal channel between the Citadel and the king; its later deliberations touched succession, education, and the preservation of history. The Conclave stands at once as a learned body and as an institution exposed to the consequences of royal politics, public catastrophe, and changing ideas about who may study.

Composition and Authority

The Conclave consists of archmaesters of the Citadel, each described as the supreme authority in one of the great disciplines. Their standing distinguishes them from the wider body of maesters, who served noble households as healers, scribes, counselors, teachers, and keepers of ravens. The archmaesters’ learning gave the Conclave a role beyond the Citadel: it could provide counsel on the government of the Seven Kingdoms and select a scholar to serve the king directly.

That influence did not amount to rule. The Conclave advised and made appointments, while kings retained the authority to request its service and act on counsel. Nor was its expertise confined to court administration. Its members studied the natural world and the past, although the limits of knowledge and disagreement among learned men remained visible. Its authority therefore rested both on specialized learning and on the confidence rulers and other readers placed in that learning.

The Grand Maester’s Office

In 5 AC, Aegon asked the Conclave to send one of its own number to advise him on matters concerning the governance of the realm. The request created the office of Grand Maester, giving the king a designated counselor drawn from the Citadel’s highest scholarly ranks. The appointment was an institutional link between royal government and the Conclave rather than a replacement for the king’s other sources of advice.

The first appointee was Archmaester Ollidar, keeper of histories, whose ring, rod, and mask were bronze. His exceptional learning was accompanied by great age: he died less than a year after taking up the office. The Conclave then selected Archmaester Lyonce, whose insignia were yellow gold. Lyonce served until 12 AC, when he slipped in mud, broke his hip, and died soon afterward. Grand Maester Gawen was elevated to succeed him. These early appointments show the Conclave repeatedly supplying the crown with a learned adviser, while the short tenures of its first two choices made succession to the office a practical concern from its beginning.

The Grand Maester’s position did not mean that royal consultation was confined to one official. Aegon also had household maesters and consulted them, as well as seeking advice from masters of coin on taxation, debts, and income. The Conclave’s distinctive contribution was to make a senior scholar available to the king across matters of governance, rather than to displace the other counselors on whom royal administration depended.

Deliberation and Political Crises

The Conclave’s work could become urgent when questions of kingship were unsettled. During the crisis surrounding Maegor’s succession, archmaesters met at the Citadel in Oldtown to debate the succession and choose a new Grand Maester. Their meeting took place as Poor Fellows marched toward King’s Landing and the competing royal claims remained unresolved. The episode places institutional deliberation beside the immediate pressures of armed conflict: the Conclave’s members had to consider the succession while the realm’s political future was being contested elsewhere.

The Conclave also appeared as a witness to public royal ceremony. Archmaesters were among those present at Aegon’s second coronation in Oldtown, which drew hundreds of lords and tens of thousands of cheering townspeople. The account associates that ceremony with the later establishment of the start of Aegon’s reign, in preference to his earlier crowning at the Aegonfort. The archmaesters’ presence did not itself confer the crown, but it connected the Citadel’s learned community with a ceremony whose historical dating became consequential.

Its formal authority did not settle every dispute. During the reign of Aegon III, the Conclave received Grand Maester Munkun’s letter describing the troubled condition of the young king and queen. The communication shows the institution as a recipient of courtly reporting as well as a source of appointments and expertise. It also places the Conclave near the record of a damaged royal household, without suggesting that it could resolve the personal or political difficulties described to it.

Learning, Access, and the Natural World

Queen Alysanne tested the limits of the Citadel’s educational tradition when she urged the Conclave to admit highborn girls as students. She told the archmaesters that she herself might have liked to become a maester and argued that girls willing to study should be given the same chance as boys. In her proposal, they could be sent home if they proved unable to keep up, just as incapable boys were. The archmaesters smiled, nodded, and promised to consider her suggestion. The account records their courteous reception, but not a decision to change the rules; the question is left open rather than presented as a reform achieved.

The Conclave’s learning also contained disagreement. Its archmaesters shared the view that the world was spherical, supported by observation and centuries of study, but they did not agree on its size. Some considered the Sunset Sea too vast to cross; others thought it might be no wider than the Summer Sea between the Arbor and Great Moraq. That difference mattered to the prospect of a western passage toward the riches of Yi Ti and Leng. The Citadel could reject the belief that the world ended in the west while remaining divided over what lay beyond the known seas and how far away it was.

Loss and the Work of Historical Memory

The Shivers struck the Conclave as part of a catastrophe that reached across the Seven Kingdoms. Oldtown lost a quarter of its population; the High Septon and forty members of the Most Devout died, as did a third of the archmaesters, maesters, acolytes, and novices at the Citadel. The losses reached across the institution’s ranks, from its senior authorities to those still training. The epidemic thus threatened not only individual lives but the community through which knowledge was taught and maintained.

The Conclave also formed part of the history it helped preserve. Former Grand Maester Orwyle was later confined in a tower cell but provided with quill, ink, and parchment to continue his confessions. He wrote for nearly two years, setting down an extensive account of the reigns of Viserys I and Aegon II that would become an invaluable source for his successor’s True Telling. This was Orwyle’s work, not a chronicle composed by the Conclave as a body, but its destination among the learned community at Oldtown underscores the Citadel’s place in the transmission of political memory.

In 135 AC, the Conclave sent white ravens from Oldtown to announce the end of one of the longest and harshest winters the Seven Kingdoms had known. The birds carried news beyond the Citadel, turning a learned institution’s communications network into a public sign of seasonal change. Across these episodes, the Conclave’s significance lies not in a single doctrine or political victory, but in its enduring connection between scholarship and the realm: it advises kings, deliberates in moments of uncertainty, trains and loses generations of learned people, and helps carry knowledge and news into the wider world.