Munkun

Munkun was Grand Maester during the early reign of Aegon III Targaryen, serving among the regents who governed while the boy king was underage. He was at once a court official, an observer of the royal household, and a chronicler whose judgments helped frame the period. His record shows a learned man close to the centers of power, but not beyond its pressures: he survived a devastating epidemic, intervened in a succession debate, and lent his support to a political decision that displaced the king’s own choices.

Office and the Regency

When Aegon III was crowned at ten, the arrangements for governing in his minority combined several offices with a seven-member council of regency. Munkun sat on that council alongside Jeyne Arryn, Corlys Velaryon, Roland Westerling, Royce Caron, Manfryd Mooton, and Torrhen Manderly. The king’s appointments also included Willis Fell as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Marston Waters as his second, Tyland Lannister as Hand, and Leowyn Corbray as Protector of the Realm. The council was deliberately mixed: some of its members had been associated with the Greens and others with the Blacks. Munkun was thus part of an attempt to govern after civil war through a balance of people drawn from opposing sides.

Cregan Stark was reportedly offered a place among the regents but refused it. Many prominent figures were left off the council, including Kermit Tully, Unwin Peake, Sabitha Frey, Thaddeus Rowan, Lyonel Hightower, Johanna Lannister, and Benjicot Blackwood. Accounts differed over how much resentment those omissions caused; Septon Eustace maintained that Peake alone was truly angered. That distinction would become consequential. Peake, excluded at the outset, later gained the upper hand when illness and absence weakened the regency’s original arrangement.

A Record of the King and Queen

Munkun’s account also preserves an unusually close view of Aegon III and his child bride, Jaehaera. In a letter to the Conclave, he described a marriage troubled from its beginning. The two children had little contact beyond rare formal occasions, and Jaehaera was reluctant to leave her chambers. Munkun understood their withdrawal in light of what each had endured: Jaehaera had witnessed the murder of her twin brother, while Aegon had lost all four of his brothers and seen his uncle kill his mother by feeding her to a dragon.

His portrait of their daily lives was stark. Jaehaera was fearful and inconsolable when corrected; Munkun said he had given her sweetsleep in her milk before the wedding because he feared she would otherwise be unable to endure the ceremony. Aegon, in turn, showed little interest in his wife or in the pursuits offered to him. He did not ride, hunt, or joust, but neither did he take pleasure in reading, dancing, or singing. He rarely began conversations, seldom smiled, and had no friends save Gaemon Palehair. Munkun noted that Aegon often stood awake at night looking toward the stars, and that the mention of dragons could provoke a rare show of anger. These observations make the Grand Maester more than a recorder of official decisions: he documented the private consequences of a war that had left its young survivors unable to live easily within the ceremonial life imposed on them.

Advice on Succession

Munkun also entered the debate over who might inherit the throne after Aegon III. With no clear succession settled, the council considered the king’s half-sisters, Baela and Rhaena Targaryen. Their competing qualities prompted arguments about birth order, temperament, and dragons. Munkun cut through these distinctions by invoking the precedent of the Great Council of 101: in his view, the principle that a male claim came before a female one made the sisters’ relative merits beside the point. When Tyland Lannister asked who the male claimant was, however, Munkun had no answer. He said that he would investigate, leaving the central question unresolved.

The exchange exposes both the force and the limitation of his appeal to precedent. The old ruling offered a framework for decision, but it could not supply a viable claimant when, as Tyland observed, the men in question seemed to have been killed. Munkun’s intervention ended the immediate argument without settling the future of the crown. His learned authority could define the terms of a political problem; it could not make the problem disappear.

The Winter Fever and Its Aftermath

When the Winter Fever reached King’s Landing, Munkun went to examine people afflicted along the Blackwater Rush, including sailors, dockworkers, and others living and working by the waterfront. Fearing that his close contact had exposed him to the illness, he did not return to the castle. Instead, he sent an urgent letter to Tyland Lannister, who ordered the city closed and the gates of the Red Keep barred. These precautions could not keep the disease out. Tens of thousands became feverish, and three-quarters of those stricken died.

Munkun was among the survivors. Willis Fell, two of his sworn brothers, Leowyn Corbray, Roland Westerling, and many others perished; Manfryd Mooton recovered, though weakened. The epidemic thinned the ranks of the king’s protectors and advisers, and the loss of regents helped create the opening through which Peake asserted control. Munkun’s own survival left him in a position to participate in the decisions that followed, even as the disease had demonstrated how little office or rank could protect the people around him.

After Tyland’s death, Aegon acted without consulting the regents. He selected Rowan as Hand, recalled Baela to court, and intended Alyn Velaryon to become admiral. Mooton, still recovering from the fever, asked that decisions wait until absent regents could return. Peake argued that those who had left King’s Landing had surrendered their places. With Munkun’s support, he set aside the king’s appointments on the grounds that a twelve-year-old lacked the judgment to decide such matters. The decision restored Marston Waters as Lord Commander, removed the white cloaks newly given to Robert Darklyn and Robin Massey, and made Peake both Hand and Protector of the Realm. The account says Munkun would later regret his acquiescence. His part in this reversal stands in sharp contrast to his earlier role in preserving Aegon’s observations and wishes: counsel to the king became support for the regent who overruled him.

Chronicler and Court Witness

Munkun’s True Telling supplies several of the period’s interpretations as well as its events. He called the brief optimism after Aegon II’s death the False Dawn, and later reflected that young warriors could mistake victory for certainty, while age possessed its own cunning. The latter judgment accompanied Alyn Velaryon’s return and the honors arranged for him, before Peake used the king’s authority to send him on another campaign. Munkun’s commentary gives his history a reflective voice: it weighs not only what people did, but how youth, power, and political calculation could distort their expectations.

His closeness to events did not make him omnipotent. When Corlys Velaryon collapsed on the Red Keep’s steps, Munkun hurried to assist him but arrived too late; the Sea Snake was dead. Across his documented service, Munkun appears both as an institutional figure and as a witness with limited control: he could examine the sick, preserve the children’s condition in a letter, and invoke precedent in council, yet epidemics and political maneuvering repeatedly changed the course of events beyond his command.