Aegon's High Hill was the first political and fortified center of King's Landing, where Aegon I Targaryen received the submission of defeated lords and established the base around which the capital grew. Its buildings changed from a crude earth-and-timber fort to the site of the Red Keep, but the hill remained a visible seat of royal authority—and, during the later civil war, a strongpoint fought over by competing claimants.

The first stronghold and royal submission

Aegon's High Hill acquired its name as Aegon I Targaryen's authority took shape at the mouth of the Blackwater Rush. On its summit he raised the Aegonfort, a crude castle of wood and earth. After taking a dozen castles and securing both banks of the river's mouth, he summoned the lords he had defeated to this stronghold. They laid their swords at his feet; he then restored them to their lands and titles. The ceremony made the hill a place where conquest was converted into political settlement, not simply a military encampment.

Aegon also used the gathering to distinguish trusted supporters with offices and honors. Daemon Velaryon was appointed master of ships, while Orys Baratheon was proclaimed the king's strong right hand and is reckoned by maesters as the first King's Hand. The hill thus became the setting for both the submission of former enemies and the organization of the new royal government. The combination mattered: Aegon could demand allegiance while offering a place within the order he was creating.

The hill within a growing capital

King's Landing developed around Aegon and his court on three hills near the river's mouth. The highest became Aegon's High Hill; the lesser elevations became Visenya’s Hill and the Hill of Rhaenys, their earlier names falling out of use. The hill was not an isolated royal site for long. Wharves, storehouses, markets, religious buildings, shops, and homes spread below it, and the settlement grew from a landing place into a major city. The royal center and the town around it expanded together, though not evenly: wealthy residents raised walled manses on the slopes, while the poor crowded into mud-and-straw hovels in the low ground between the hills.

The Aegonfort itself struggled to keep pace. Its first defenses and buildings were enlarged while the Conquest was still underway. A fifty-foot log keep and a great longhall were added, with a stone kitchen roofed in slate; stables, a granary, and a taller watchtower followed. A new palisade enclosed more of the hilltop, making room for a barracks, an armory, a sept, and a drum tower. These additions gave the royal household more space, but did not make the fort a finished or imposing castle.

By the later years of Aegon's reign, the settlement had become a sprawling city of about a hundred thousand people, yet remained dirty, ill-planned, and impermanent in character. The Aegonfort had spread halfway down the hill, outgrowing its old log palisades and becoming a confusion of wood, earth, and brick. In 35 AC, Aegon moved his court back to Dragonstone and ordered the fort demolished so that a stone castle could take its place. Lord Alyn Stokeworth and Queen Visenya were charged with overseeing its design and construction. The hill's original stronghold was therefore not preserved as a monument: it was cleared to make way for a more durable royal seat, the Red Keep.

A contested royal strongpoint

Much later, during the struggle involving Rhaenyra Targaryen and Aegon II Targaryen, the hill's political importance was expressed through rival claims to the Iron Throne. After Rhaenyra fled King's Landing, Trystane Truefyre, a squire backed by Ser Perkin the Flea, sat the Iron Throne atop Aegon's High Hill and issued decrees from there. He repealed Rhaenyra's unpopular taxes, distributed treasury money among his followers, canceled debts, and raised sixty of his gutter knights to noble rank. He also promised the poor the right to take certain game from the kingswood. These proclamations turned the hill into the seat of a makeshift regime whose authority rested partly on popular concessions and partly on armed control.

Ser Perkin recruited surviving gold cloaks to Trystane's banner and seized the Dragon Gate, the King's Gate, and the Lion Gate, in addition to another gate, giving his faction control of four of the city's seven entrances and more than half its wall towers. The hill's claim to rule was therefore connected to the defenses below it: a claimant occupying the royal seat could also command much of the city's access and fortification system. Yet the city had other rival powers, and Trystane's position remained one among competing kingships rather than an uncontested restoration of royal government.

When Lord Borros Baratheon and his stormlanders reached King's Landing, they found the walls unmanned, the gates undefended, and the streets and squares empty except for corpses. As Borros climbed Aegon's High Hill, Trystane's ragged banners were being pulled down from the gatehouse battlements and the golden dragon banner of Aegon II raised in their place. Queen Alicent Hightower welcomed Borros from the Red Keep, while Ser Perkin told him that Trystane had been taken and chained. Borros then moved against the rival regime on Visenya’s Hill, defeating Gaemon Palehair and his followers before turning against the Shepherd's dwindling force.

The Red Keep and the transfer of power

The hill's royal buildings also held the human cost of the shifting claims. When the riverlords later entered the city, they found Aegon II's body laid beneath the Iron Throne in the Red Keep, with Queen Alicent weeping beside it. The gathering in the hall included Larys Strong, Grand Maester Orwyle, Ser Perkin the Flea, Mushroom, Septon Eustace, Ser Gyles Belgrave, four Kingsguard, and lesser lords and household knights. Orwyle hailed the riverlords as deliverers, and the new regime's supporters came forward to acclaim Prince Aegon as king.

Across these changes, Aegon's High Hill carries two connected meanings. It began as the practical site of a rough fort and a public submission ceremony; as King's Landing expanded, it became the location of a permanent royal castle. In the later conflict, occupying the hill and its Iron Throne was not enough by itself to settle the succession, but control of the Red Keep, its gates, and its surrounding defenses helped determine who could claim authority in the capital. The hill's history makes the city's political geography tangible: royal power was built there, contested there, and repeatedly made visible through the banners raised above its walls.