Valyrian Targaryen Marriage Customs

Valyrian Targaryen Marriage Customs was a dynastic practice that favored marriage between close kin, most ideally a brother and sister. The Targaryens carried it from Old Valyria into Westeros, where it stood in persistent tension with the Faith of the Seven. Its consequences reached beyond household life: the practice helped define the dynasty’s claim to preserve its lineage, tested the Crown’s accord with the Faith, and influenced how royal marriages and political alliances were arranged.

Definition and Valyrian Background

In the tradition described by the histories, a brother-sister marriage was considered ideal. If that match was unavailable, a woman might marry an uncle, cousin, or nephew, and a man a cousin, aunt, or niece. The custom was associated especially with ancient Valyrian families that bred and rode dragons. Its rationale was that the blood of the dragon should remain pure, a belief treated as dynastic wisdom rather than as a rule shared by the peoples of Westeros.

Marriage between kin was the central feature of the practice; taking more than one wife was a separate, less common Valyrian custom. Some sorcerer princes had done so when they wished. The distinction matters in the later history of House Targaryen: the dynasty’s sibling marriages drew opposition from the Faith, while a king’s second marriage could intensify that dispute by challenging the Faith’s rejection of plural marriage as well.

Conflict with the Faith

In most of Westeros, the Faith of the Seven held religious authority, and its doctrines condemned the Valyrian customs practiced by the Targaryens. Incest was held to be sinful, and children of such unions were regarded as religiously unacceptable. The book therefore presents conflict between the Faith and House Targaryen as a structural consequence of their different rules of marriage, even when political circumstances kept that conflict from coming openly to a head.

Aegon the Conqueror’s marriages show how the tension could be contained without being resolved. He took both his sisters, Visenya Targaryen and Rhaenys Targaryen, as wives. Yet the High Septon who anointed Aegon at Oldtown’s Starry Sept did not turn that public act of religious recognition into an explicit ruling that the marriage custom was lawful. During Aegon’s reign, he maintained good relations with successive High Septons, honored the Faith’s traditional privileges, exempted its wealth and property from taxation, and recognized its courts’ authority over its servants. The resulting accommodation preserved relations between Crown and Faith while leaving the question of incestuous marriage unsettled.

The restraint at the level of high religious leadership did not mean that opposition disappeared. Humble members of the Faith continued to regard brother-sister marriage and a man’s taking two wives as sinful. The histories thus distinguish the diplomatic conduct of rulers and High Septons from popular religious judgment: courtesy between institutions could defer a conflict without reconciling their underlying teachings.

Royal Marriages and Dynastic Practice

The custom directly shaped Aegon’s family. Visenya and Rhaenys each bore him a son, but Aegon had no daughters. His sons, Aenys and Maegor, therefore had no sisters to marry, and both had to seek brides elsewhere. Aenys’s marriage in 22 AC to Alyssa, daughter of Aethan Velaryon, was regarded as a marriage between cousins because the Velaryons were an ancient family of Valyrian descent and Aegon’s mother had also been a Velaryon. The match shows that the tradition could extend its preference for kinship beyond a brother-sister pairing, even when the spouses belonged to different houses.

The Targaryen queens also used marriage to bind distant regions and rival families into a wider political community. Visenya and Rhaenys arranged matches between noble houses from across the realm. Ronnel Arryn married a daughter of Torrhen Stark; the heir to Casterly Rock wed a Redwyne; and three daughters of the Evenstar of Tarth were betrothed to members of House Corbray, House Hightower, and House Harlaw. Visenya brokered a double wedding between House Blackwood and House Bracken, matching a son of each house with a daughter of the other to seal peace between longstanding rivals. These alliances did not reproduce the Valyrian ideal of close-kin marriage; they show the royal family using marriage more broadly as a means of connecting the conquered realm.

That political function continued in later negotiations. At White Harbor, Desmond Manderly recalled an earlier promise by the Old King to join his house to the Targaryens through Princess Viserra, a marriage that never took place because she died. During the Dance of the Dragons, Jacaerys Velaryon agreed that his brother Joffrey would marry Lord Manderly’s youngest daughter after the war. Here marriage served as a negotiated alliance between houses, not as an assertion that the old Valyrian kinship rule governed every royal or political match.

Dispute and Consequences

The marriage of Maegor I to a second wife made the distinction between dynastic custom and Westerosi religious law impossible to ignore. In 39 AC, Maegor announced that Ceryse Hightower was barren and that he had taken Alys Harroway as another wife. The marriage was performed on Dragonstone under the authority of Dowager Queen Visenya, after the castle septon refused to officiate, and followed a Valyrian rite. It took place without the knowledge or consent of King Aenys. The High Septon denounced the union, while Manfred Hightower, Ceryse’s father, demanded that Alys be put aside.

Maegor defended his position by pointing to his father’s marriages to both sisters: in his view, the Faith’s strictures could govern lesser men but not the blood of the dragon. Aenys ordered him to put Alys aside and return to Ceryse or accept five years of exile. Maegor chose exile in 40 AC, leaving for Pentos with Alys, Balerion, and the sword Blackfyre; Ceryse remained behind. Aenys’s appointment of Septon Murmison as Hand did not quiet the Faith’s condemnation or the lords’ criticism of the king. The episode shows a dynastic custom functioning not as a settled legal exemption, but as a claim that could divide the royal family and weaken a king unable to enforce his decision.

Marriage, Succession, and Legacy

The broader history of succession also shows why marriage customs should not be mistaken for a complete rule of inheritance. When Prince Aemon died, his daughter Rhaenys was passed over in favor of his brother Baelon, despite her marriage to Corlys Velaryon and the political standing of that alliance. At the Great Council of 101 AC, Corlys and Rhaenys campaigned for their son Laenor, but the assembled lords chose Viserys by an overwhelming margin. The resulting precedent concerned whether the Iron Throne could pass to a woman or through a woman to her descendants; it was not the Valyrian rule governing whom Targaryens should marry. Together, the cases reveal two distinct forces at work: inherited ideas about preserving the dragonlords’ bloodline and political judgments about who could inherit the Crown.

The practice endured into the Dance of the Dragons. Aegon II was crowned with his sister Helaena as his wife, and the ceremony publicly presented her as queen. That marriage demonstrates the survival of close-kin marriage within the ruling family, but the earlier conflicts show that its persistence did not make it universally accepted. Across the histories, Valyrian Targaryen Marriage Customs appears both as a marker of dynastic identity and as a recurring source of friction with the religious and political order in which the dynasty ruled.