House Baratheon

House Baratheon was established during Aegon I Targaryen’s Conquest when Orys Baratheon defeated Argilac Durrandon, married Argilac’s daughter Argella, and took the defeated dynasty’s arms and words. Its foundation thus joined a new ruling house to the old Storm Kings: Orys became lord of Storm’s End, while the crowned stag and the Durrandon inheritance gave House Baratheon a lasting place in the political order of the Stormlands.

Foundation in the Conquest

Before the war, Argilac sought an alliance with Aegon by offering his daughter in marriage and proposing lands east of the Gods Eye as her dowry. Aegon rejected the offer, judging that Argilac was trying to place the Targaryens between his own territory and Harren the Black’s lands. Aegon instead proposed that Argilac yield additional territory and marry Argella to Orys, his childhood friend and champion. Argilac angrily refused, objecting that Orys was believed to be Aegon’s baseborn half-brother. His rejection was accompanied by a violent insult to Aegon’s envoy, and the proposed marriage alliance gave way to war.

Orys led Aegon’s forces against Argilac. The Storm King’s mounted attacks struggled on steep, rain-soaked ground, while the fighting continued into the night. In the decisive encounter, Queen Rhaenys Targaryen and her dragon Meraxes helped break Argilac’s final charge. Orys then met the old king in combat and offered him a last chance to yield. Argilac refused and died fighting; his fall ended the Stormlanders’ resistance in the field. The outcome made Orys not merely a conqueror’s commander but the successor to the ruling house he had helped defeat.

The Durrandon Inheritance and Royal Service

Argella initially resisted Orys’s approach to Storm’s End and claimed the title of Storm Queen. When the castle’s defenders surrendered her to the Targaryen camp, Orys released her, treated her gently, and told her how her father had died. He then married her in honor of Argilac and assumed the Durrandon arms and words. Storm’s End became his seat, and the crowned stag became his sigil. The account presents this inheritance as a political settlement shaped by personal recognition of the defeated king’s courage, rather than as the simple replacement of one family’s symbols with another’s.

Orys also became one of the principal founders of Aegon’s new royal government. At Aegonfort, where the defeated lords laid down their swords, Aegon confirmed many of them in their lands and titles while rewarding his oldest supporters with offices. He named Orys his shield, stalwart, and strong right hand, and the maesters consequently reckon Orys the first King’s Hand. House Baratheon therefore began with two connected sources of standing: Storm’s End and the Stormlands inherited through Argella, and a central role in the government of the conquered realm through Orys.

Orys and the Stormlands

Orys’s career continued to bind the house’s authority to the defense of the Stormlands. In the later campaign against the Vulture King, he rode from Storm’s End to relieve Stonehelm and defeat the Dornish force besieging it. Walter Wyl, the wounded son of the man who had taken Orys’s hand, was brought before him; Orys treated the encounter as repayment for that earlier loss. Orys himself died from wounds suffered in the battle while marching back to Storm’s End. His son Davos later said that Orys died content, a family recollection that framed the hard-fought victory as a final act of vengeance and service to his lands.

The house’s later political importance rested less on a single office than on its connections across the realm. Jocelyn Baratheon was the mother of Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, whose claim to the Iron Throne was challenged when Jaehaerys I Targaryen passed over her in favor of her uncle Baelon. Jocelyn and her formidable brother Boremund, Lord of Storm’s End, were angered by the decision. When the Great Council of 101 AC considered the succession again, Boremund supported Rhaenys’s son Laenor Velaryon. The lords instead chose Viserys Targaryen by a reported margin of more than twenty to one. The result established a powerful precedent against the Iron Throne passing to a woman or through a woman to her descendants, limiting the prospects of a claimant whose maternal family included House Baratheon.

Alliances and Later Political Crises

House Baratheon’s place in the realm also depended on marriage and patronage. Aegon I Targaryen and his queens sought to reconcile the conquered kingdoms by bringing the children of former foes to court and arranging marriages between noble houses. That broader policy helps explain how noble kinship could connect distant regions and keep political relationships active beyond the battlefield. In a later succession crisis, Storm’s End was among the great seats reported to have communicated secretly with Alyssa Velaryon before deciding whether to support Aegon the Uncrowned. During the Dance of the Dragons, Prince Daemon Targaryen also planned to send ravens to Storm’s End to seek the allegiance of its lord. These episodes show the continuing strategic value of the Baratheon seat, while not by themselves establishing what choice the house ultimately made in either instance.

The family’s position after the Dance was shaped by the deaths of its adult lord and the youth of his heir. Elenda Baratheon, widow of Borros, remained at Storm’s End with their infant son Olyvar and sent her daughters Cassandra, Ellyn, and Floris to represent the house at Aegon III’s coronation and wedding. Her father, Royce Caron, escorted them and stayed as their guardian. In 132 AC, with Dornish incursions into the Stormlands increasing and outlaws troubling the kingswood, Elenda married Ser Steffon Connington, a younger son of the Lord of Griffin’s Roost. He was twenty years younger than she was and had served with valor in Borros’s campaign against the Vulture King; Elenda chose him in the hope that he could help keep the peace.

Later, during the search for a bride for King Aegon III, Elenda put forward Cassandra and Ellyn as potential royal consorts. Cassandra had previously been betrothed to Aegon II and was presented as prepared for queenship. Elenda’s proposals placed House Baratheon among the houses seeking influence through the royal marriage market, just as earlier generations had used marriage and kinship to secure alliances and succession claims.

Dynastic Significance

Across these episodes, House Baratheon appears as a house whose power rests on both territory and relationships. Its original bond to the Durrandons gave it Storm’s End and the symbols of the former Storm Kings; Orys’s service placed its founder near the center of royal government. Later Baratheons entered disputes through blood ties to Rhaenys, support for Laenor, the political weight of Storm’s End, and the marriage initiatives of Elenda. The house’s history therefore links military conquest to the quieter mechanisms that preserved influence afterward: office, inheritance, guardianship, and marriage.