The marriage of Jaehaerys I Targaryen and Alysanne Targaryen

The marriage of Jaehaerys Targaryen and Alysanne Targaryen joined two siblings raised to expect one another as spouses, but it was not simply a private match or a settled dynastic custom. When the regents sought to arrange a different marriage for the young king, the siblings acted for themselves: they flew by dragon to Dragonstone and married there. Their union endured the political resistance that followed, was affirmed in a second public wedding in King’s Landing, and became a partnership in which Alysanne stood beside Jaehaerys in both domestic life and the work of ruling.

A dynastic custom under political pressure

Alysanne and Jaehaerys grew up close and affectionate, expecting, as their elder siblings Aegon and Rhaena had, that they would marry. The Targaryens had practiced sibling marriage for centuries. Yet the death of King Aenys and the violence that followed made the custom a political danger as well as a family tradition. Queen Alyssa had once wished for the match, but came to fear that announcing it would provoke the Faith and former members of the Warrior’s Sons and Poor Fellows, as the marriage of Aegon and Rhaena had done. Her caution was shaped by what had happened to her elder children; she did not want the realm to face that conflict again.

The regents and their councillors debated the king’s marriage for much of a moon’s turn. Several alternatives were advanced, including a match with the widowed Queen Elinor, and the council eventually settled on a bride for Jaehaerys without consulting him. Alysanne was to be married instead to a man ten years her senior, whom she scarcely knew. The decision treated the siblings’ marriage as a matter of state to be managed by their guardians. Alysanne did not appeal to her mother or submit quietly: once she learned of the arrangement, she went directly to Jaehaerys. The king recognized that marriage plans were being made for him as well, and chose to act rather than contest the decision through the regents.

The secret wedding on Dragonstone

Jaehaerys summoned his Kingsguard and ordered them to sail for Dragonstone without disclosing his departure. That night he and Alysanne mounted Vermithor and Silverwing and left the Red Keep for the ancient Targaryen stronghold below the Dragonmont. Their choice of refuge was also a choice of witness: Septon Oswyck, who had known them from birth and taught them the Faith, served the island’s sept. Unlike Septon Mattheus, whom Jaehaerys did not trust with the plan, Oswyck knew the Targaryen tradition of sibling marriage and agreed to perform the rites.

A few days later, after the Kingsguard arrived by galley, Jaehaerys and Alysanne married in Dragonstone’s great yard. Oswyck officiated before the seven white-cloaked knights, the castle garrison and servants, and people from the fishing village beneath the castle walls. The ceremony made their choice visible beyond the royal household, though it did not yet settle the political dispute. A modest feast followed. Because Alysanne was young, there was no bedding ceremony and the marriage was not consummated at that time; the distinction would later matter when the regents arrived and challenged what the couple had done.

Queen Alyssa and Lord Rogar Baratheon came to Dragonstone with armed men and advisers. Alyssa intervened before the confrontation could turn to violence, accepting that the marriage had been made and calling for the swords to be put away. Jaehaerys made clear that the couple would not undo their union, and Alysanne affirmed that she would return to him even if sent away. The immediate crisis ended without a fight. After the visitors departed, the king and queen closed the castle gates and remained on Dragonstone for the rest of Jaehaerys’s minority.

Shared life and public recognition

During their stay on Dragonstone, the couple were seldom apart. They shared meals and conversations, fished and hawked, read together in the castle library, studied with the island’s maesters, and prayed with Oswyck. They also spent time among the smallfolk in dockside inns and flew together around the Dragonmont and as far as Driftmark. These details present the marriage not only as a claim the siblings defended, but as a daily companionship formed during the king’s minority. When councillors visited, Jaehaerys received them in the Chamber of the Painted Table with Alysanne beside him, making her presence part of the conduct of rule as well as their private life.

The secrecy ended when Alysanne came to King’s Landing at Jaehaerys’s summons, after nearly half a year apart. The king and queen slept separately for a moon while preparations were made for a second wedding. Rather than spend the Crown’s strained resources on another lavish Golden Wedding, Jaehaerys held a ceremony at the Red Keep beneath the Iron Throne. Septon Barth pronounced them married in the presence of Queen Alyssa, Lord Rogar and other guests; Rhaena also flew in on Dreamfyre to see her siblings and visit her daughter Aerea. Bells rang across the city, and ravens carried news of the union throughout the realm. Alysanne insisted that this wedding include a formal bedding, removing lingering doubt over whether the marriage was fully established. The public ceremony transformed a union first made by the couple’s own decision into a recognized royal marriage.

Partnership in rule and dynastic policy

Alysanne’s place beside Jaehaerys extended beyond the wedding ceremonies. He took her with him on journeys while she remained at Dragonstone or King’s Landing at other times, often sitting the Iron Throne and ruling on matters that came before her. Their partnership belonged to a broader pattern of royal governance: Aegon the Conqueror had trusted his sisters as partners in power, and Jaehaerys presented his own openness with Alysanne as following that precedent. Their marriage therefore linked family intimacy to the public authority of the crown.

The union also stood within the dynasty’s wider effort to use marriage to bind the realm. Aegon’s court welcomed children of former opponents, while his queens arranged marriages between houses from distant regions and even between old rivals. Such matches sought to connect conquered lands through kinship. By contrast, Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s sibling marriage asserted a specifically Targaryen practice that the Faith did not generally accept. During Jaehaerys’s reign, the Seven Speakers defended the marriage through the Doctrine of Exceptionalism, which acknowledged the Faith’s prohibition of incest while arguing that the Targaryens, with their Valyrian ancestry and dragons, were different. The couple’s marriage thus became a central example in the effort to reconcile dynastic custom with religious authority.

The marriage’s significance also belongs to the history of succession. The Targaryen family’s marriage practices and the realm’s preference for male heirs did not prevent disputes over who should inherit: later, Jaehaerys’s decision to name Baelon heir passed over Princess Rhaenys and her unborn child. The available account does not make that decision a consequence of Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s marriage, but it shows the political setting in which royal kinship and inheritance were repeatedly tested. Their own union, meanwhile, endured from a disputed secret wedding to a public and politically consequential partnership at the center of the reign.