The Great Rift

The Great Rift was the estrangement between Jaehaerys Targaryen and Alysanne Targaryen that threatened to overshadow their granddaughter Rhaenys’s coming marriage. Septa Maegelle persuaded her father to return to King’s Landing and her mother to leave Dragonstone, bringing the couple back together before the wedding. The name itself changed: maesters initially called the estrangement the Great Rift, but after a later and nearly as bitter dispute it became known as the First Quarrel.

Name and Historical Context

The maesters of Jaehaerys’s time called the estrangement the Great Rift. The passage of time, together with a subsequent quarrel nearly as bitter, gave the earlier rupture a new name: the First Quarrel. That later dispute was recorded as the Second Quarrel, so the changing terminology distinguishes two separate periods of estrangement rather than two names for the same one.

The rupture mattered in a marriage that was also a partnership in rule. Aegon I’s sisters Visenya and Rhaenys had remained influential partners in power, and Jaehaerys customarily traveled with one queen while the other stayed behind to hear matters brought before her. Against that history of queens exercising political authority, the estrangement of Jaehaerys and Alysanne was more than a private disagreement: it divided a royal couple long accustomed to governing together.

Reconciliation Before Rhaenys’s Wedding

In 89 AC, Jaehaerys was still traveling through the realm. At Highgarden he was joined by his granddaughter Princess Rhaenys, who flew to him on Meleys. They visited all four Shield Islands, and on Greenshield, in Lord Chester’s hall, Rhaenys told Jaehaerys she intended to marry and received his blessing. Her wedding the following year gave the family a reason to want both king and queen present.

Septa Maegelle confronted her father with that prospect. She reminded him that Rhaenys would want the whole family at the wedding, including both parents, and invoked Jaehaerys’s reputation as the Conciliator: “It is time that you conciliated.” Her intervention connected a family occasion to the task of repairing the royal household, rather than treating reconciliation as something that could be postponed indefinitely.

A fortnight later, Jaehaerys returned to King’s Landing, and Alysanne came back from her self-imposed exile on Dragonstone. The histories do not preserve what passed between them. They do record the outcome: for a good while afterward, the king and queen were again as close as they had been before. In 90 AC, they shared one of their last good times together at Rhaenys’s wedding to Corlys Velaryon.

The Second Quarrel and the Distinction Between Them

The later Second Quarrel arose from Jaehaerys’s decision to name Baelon, rather than Rhaenys or her unborn child, heir to the Iron Throne. Alysanne objected to her granddaughter being passed over because she was a woman. She told the king, “A ruler needs a good head and a true heart. A cock is not essential. If Your Grace truly believes that women lack the wit to rule, plainly you have no further need of me.” She then left King’s Landing for Dragonstone on Silverwing.

Jaehaerys and Alysanne remained apart for two years. They were reconciled in 94 AC through Septa Maegelle’s good offices, but the reconciliation did not settle their disagreement about the succession. Alysanne continued to believe that Rhaenys and her children had been unjustly denied their rights. This later rupture helps explain why the earlier Great Rift acquired the retrospective name First Quarrel: the same marriage endured more than one estrangement, with distinct causes and consequences.