Rogare Bank

Rogare Bank was the financial foundation of House Rogare’s wealth and influence, but its fortunes depended on the decisions of the family member who controlled it. When Lysaro Rogare diverted its gold to finance his political ambitions, the bank’s resources became entangled with a scheme to conquer a rival city and elevate him to the highest office in Lys. Rumors of weakness triggered demands for repayment, the vaults ran dry, and the collapse spread far beyond the family: depositors in Westeros as well as Lys discovered that their money was gone.

Ownership and Control

Under Lysandro the Magnificent, the Rogare family’s wealth extended across offices, ships, residences, and commercial holdings. His children could not inherit his civic offices, but his property was apportioned among them: Lysara Rogare received the palace, Drako Rogare the ships, Fredo Rogare the pillow house, and Marra Rogare the library. All of Lysandro’s children shared in the wealth represented by Rogare Bank. His trueborn children received shares, as did his bastards, though the bastards’ portions were smaller than those of his legitimate sons and daughters.

A division of family property did not mean a division of the institution’s command. Effective control of Rogare Bank passed to Lysandro’s eldest son, Lysaro. That concentration of authority made the bank vulnerable to his decisions: family members had claims on its wealth, but Lysaro was positioned to direct its funds. His inheritance therefore carried both great financial power and the ability to place the wider family’s fortunes at risk.

Lysaro’s Political Ambition

Lysaro sought to rule Lys, but he lacked the patience to build power gradually as his father had done. He first secured his person with a force of one thousand Unsullied, purchased from the slavers of Astapor. He then won election as gonfaloniere by combining lavish entertainments for the commons with bribes for the magisters. These expenditures exhausted his personal fortune, and he began diverting gold from Rogare Bank.

His intended recovery depended on a war. Lysaro meant to provoke a brief, successful conflict with either Tyrosh or Myr, expecting that the glory of conquest would help him win the office of first magister. The spoils of a captured city, he believed, would restore the money taken from the bank and make him the richest man in Lys. The plan treated the bank’s reserves as a temporary source of political capital, on the assumption that victory would replenish them. Instead, it exposed depositors to a risk they had not chosen and made the institution’s stability depend on Lysaro’s success in war and politics.

The Run and Collapse

Talk that Rogare Bank might be unsound spread through Lys, although the account does not establish who began the rumors. The city’s magisters and merchant princes responded by demanding their deposits. At first only a few sought repayment, but the requests multiplied until withdrawals became a flood of gold from Lysaro’s vaults. The reserves were exhausted, and the bank was left an empty shell. The crisis was not merely a rumor-driven panic: Lysaro had already diverted funds, and the withdrawals revealed that the bank could no longer meet what its depositors were demanding.

By the time the vaults ran dry, Lysaro had fled Lys in the night with one hundred Unsullied, three bed slaves, and six servants. He abandoned his wife, daughters, and palace. The city’s magisters moved to seize the bank, only to find that little remained. The collapse thus turned the concentrated control that had enabled Lysaro to use the bank into a liability for the family and its creditors: once confidence broke, neither its reputation nor its remaining assets could stop the demands for repayment.

Losses Beyond Lys

The consequences reached Westeros when word of the bank’s failure arrived. Lords and merchants who had entrusted money to House Rogare realized that their coin was lost. In Gulltown, Moredo Rogare relinquished his command to Alyn Oakenfist and sailed for Braavos. In King’s Landing, Lotho Rogare was arrested as he tried to leave; his letters and ledgers were seized, along with the gold and silver still in the vaults atop Visenya’s Hill. Roggerio Rogare was also taken into custody, and both brothers were held in the Red Keep. Their family connection to Prince Viserys’s wife spared them, for the time being, from the black cells, but not from the consequences of the financial ruin.

The bank’s collapse also prompted different standards of judgment in Lys and the Seven Kingdoms. Lysaro was condemned for his depredations and died during his sentence. In Westeros, Lotho and Roggerio faced accusations of fraud and theft because the failure had impoverished thousands, but the evidence did not show that either brother had known of Lysaro’s actions in Lys or benefited from his use of the bank. Lotho was found guilty of theft and chose the loss of his right hand rather than taking the black; no crime could be proved against Roggerio, who nevertheless received seven lashes. The distinction between their penalties and Lysaro’s harsher fate reflected both the extent of the damage and the difficulty of assigning responsibility within a family whose wealth had been bound together through the bank.

The ruin was not confined to financial accounts. In Lys, the family’s properties and commercial holdings were seized, including the residences and their furnishings, ships and cargoes, wharves, and storehouses. The assets proved insufficient to meet more than a fraction of the debts left by the failure, and members of the Rogare family were sold into slavery. The institution’s collapse therefore dismantled the material base of the house whose wealth it had represented. Rogare Bank’s story is a concentrated example of how personal control over shared capital could turn political ambition into a crisis for depositors, relatives, and distant trading partners alike.