After the Conquest

After the Conquest is the historical era used to place events in relation to Aegon’s Conquest. In the chronicle, dates appear both as the full phrase and in the abbreviated form AC, creating a chronological frame that ranges from the opening of the First Dornish War to the winter of 59–60 AC. Its significance is practical as well as structural: it locates wars, royal transitions, and crises within the same reckoning, while the text sometimes preserves uncertainty about the precise point at which an event began.

Dating and Its Reference Point

The era takes Aegon’s Conquest as its reference. The chronicle uses the explicit phrase “the 50th since Aegon’s Conquest” when marking the arrival of a new year, and elsewhere abbreviates the reckoning as AC. Thus 50 AC and the 50th year since the Conquest are presented as corresponding ways to locate a point in the timeline. The notation gives readers a common chronological frame across accounts of different reigns and regions.

The wording can also signal how firmly a date is known. The beginning of the First Dornish War is “generally fixed” at 4 AC, a qualified dating rather than an unambiguous record of a single day. The narrative then describes the invasion’s movements and hardships, but the cited account does not give those stages a more precise AC date. The era supplies an anchor without making every detail of a campaign equally exact.

Early and Mid-Century Markers

The chronicle’s early marker is 4 AC, when Rhaenys Targaryen returned to Dorne and the First Dornish War began. The subsequent account describes Orys Baratheon’s force entering the Boneway and Aegon Targaryen’s army advancing through the Prince’s Pass. The campaign’s difficulties included poisoned water, shortages of food and fodder, and losses among men and horses; these details give the dated beginning a military context, although the excerpt does not assign each episode its own year.

A later cluster of dates marks political change in the 48th year After the Conquest. In that year, the chronicle says, Maegor’s remaining support dwindled, while Jaehaerys Targaryen was proclaimed king at Storm’s End. The coronation followed in the waning days of that same year, in the Starry Sept, and seven days of feasting brought lords from across the realm to swear their swords to Jaehaerys. The shared year marker makes the proclamation and coronation legible as stages in a rapid transfer of allegiance.

The next explicit milestones are the turn to the 50th year since the Conquest and Jaehaerys’s first royal progress, announced late in 51 AC. The account identifies the first progress as a royal initiative and notes that many more followed during his reign. These dates show the era doing more than ordering wars and accessions: it also situates the routine exercise of kingship within the same historical sequence.

The Winter of 59–60 AC

The winter of 59–60 AC is treated as a span, not merely as a single dated incident. The chronicle describes a harsh winter that brought failed harvests and famine across the North and other regions before the Shivers spread through the Seven Kingdoms. It reports that port cities and harbor towns were struck first and hardest, and that kittens became so sought after that they sold for as much as destriers. The paired years therefore mark a prolonged season whose consequences crossed regional boundaries and affected both food supplies and public health.

Chronological Scope

Together, the cited dates establish a sequence from 4 AC through 59–60 AC, with particularly clear markers at the 48th year, 50 AC, and late 51 AC. The entries do not date every event they recount, and some dating is expressly approximate; the reckoning should therefore be understood as the chronicle’s framework for historical placement, not as a promise that every episode has an equally precise timestamp. Its recurring use lets readers compare distant events while retaining the distinctions the text makes between a fixed year, a year’s closing days, and a crisis lasting across two years.