50 AC

50 AC was the fiftieth year after Aegon’s Conquest and a hinge between the uneasy regency of Jaehaerys Targaryen and his personal rule. The realm prepared to celebrate half a century of Targaryen government, but beneath the public optimism, rivalries within the royal family threatened to undo the unity that had brought Jaehaerys to the throne.

A Jubilee Under Gathering Clouds

The new year began with plans for feasts, fairs, and tourneys to mark fifty years of Targaryen rule. The terrors of Maegor’s reign seemed to be receding, the Iron Throne and the Faith had been reconciled, and Jaehaerys was popular with both lords and smallfolk. Yet this confidence concealed mounting tensions. The year’s significance lay not simply in the round number being celebrated, but in the contrast between a realm commemorating its apparent stability and a royal household whose cohesion was beginning to fail.

That cohesion had helped Jaehaerys, his sisters, and their mother overthrow Maegor. By 50 AC, however, old resentments and new divisions were pulling them apart. The king and his young queen, Alysanne, came into sharp conflict with the Queen Regent Alyssa and the Hand, Rogar Baratheon. The rivalry outlasted the regency and threatened to return the Seven Kingdoms to war. Alyssa wanted time to ensure that the bloodshed and disorder surrounding another royal marriage would not be repeated, even as the realm approached the end of her son’s minority.

Three Queens, Three Centers of Power

The political balance of 50 AC was unusually concentrated in the hands of three related women. In King’s Landing, Alyssa was Queen Regent, widow of Aenys Targaryen, mother of Jaehaerys, and wife of Rogar Baratheon. Across Blackwater Bay on Dragonstone, Alysanne, only thirteen, had pledged herself to her brother Jaehaerys against the wishes of Alyssa and Rogar. On Fair Isle, separated from her mother and sister by the breadth of Westeros, Rhaena Targaryen lived as the widowed queen of Aegon the Uncrowned. In the westerlands, riverlands, and parts of the Reach, some already called her the Queen in the West.

Their kinship and shared suffering did not prevent political estrangement. The unity that had brought down Maegor was giving way to separate claims, grievances, and centers of influence. The account contrasts the three queens with Maegor’s consorts, who were subject to his will: each queen of 50 AC possessed power in her own right. The resulting arrangement made the year’s court politics more than a dispute between a young king and his regents; it placed a divided royal family at the center of government.

The secret marriage of Jaehaerys and Alysanne was the immediate trigger. It caught Alyssa and Rogar unaware and disrupted their own plans, but it was not the only source of mistrust. Rogar had married Alyssa without first asking Jaehaerys’s leave, which the king took as disrespect. He valued Rogar as a counselor and friend, but did not want a second father and believed his own judgment superior. He also felt that he should have been consulted about Rhaena’s marriage, though that slight weighed less heavily. Alyssa, in turn, was hurt that she had neither been told of nor invited to Rhaena’s wedding on Fair Isle.

The Regency Reaches Its End

As the regency neared its close, Rogar’s brother’s failure and imprisonment left the Hand in despair, though he did not summon his banners. He prepared a will and confession, absolved several of his brothers of involvement, asked mercy for Orryn, and named Borys his heir at Storm’s End. Meanwhile, with Alyssa and Rogar wounded and silent, Daemon Velaryon and the remaining members of the queen’s council tried to govern until the king came of age.

On the twentieth day of the ninth moon of 50 AC, Jaehaerys reached his sixteenth nameday. Under the laws of the Seven Kingdoms, he was now old enough to rule without a regent. The date changed the formal basis of power: authority no longer rested with the regency, and the young king assumed responsibility for the realm in his own right. Lords and smallfolk across the kingdoms waited to see what kind of king he would be.

The Long View of Rule and Succession

The year’s transition belonged to a longer history in which Targaryen authority had been built through more than conquest. Aegon’s reign sought to reconcile the kingdoms to Targaryen rule by drawing people from across the realm into court and council. The children of former foes served there as pages, cupbearers, squires, handmaidens, and companions to the queens, encountering royal justice and a court meant to encourage loyalty to one realm rather than separate regions. Marriages arranged by Visenya and Rhaenys likewise joined distant houses and, in one case, sought to make peace between the long-feuding Blackwood and Bracken families. These policies formed part of the political settlement inherited by Jaehaerys, even as the divisions of 50 AC showed how precarious dynastic unity could remain.

Later succession disputes would make that fragility explicit. After Prince Aemon died, Jaehaerys passed over Aemon’s daughter Rhaenys in favor of Baelon, judging his adult son better suited to rule than Rhaenys or her unborn child. At the Great Council of 101 AC, the assembled lords chose Viserys over Rhaenys’s son Laenor by a reported margin of more than twenty to one; many regarded the decision as establishing that the Iron Throne could not pass to a woman or through a woman to her male descendants. Those later decisions were not events of 50 AC, but they belong to the same dynastic history in which the end of Jaehaerys’s regency placed personal rule, family claims, and the settlement of succession in continual relation.