Volantis is a major Free City whose position in the histories of Westeros shifts between rival power, welcoming host, and place of refuge. Its connections to the Targaryens and the Triarchy show how events across the Narrow Sea could shape royal fears, succession debates, and the fortunes of individuals far from the Iron Throne.

Political position across the Narrow Sea

Volantis appears first as a formidable rival to the cities that would form the Triarchy. Ten years before the Triarchy’s seizure of the Stepstones, Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh set aside their longstanding hostilities to fight Volantis. After defeating the Volantenes at the Battle of the Borderland, the three cities made an alliance and turned their combined forces west. Volantis sued for peace and withdrew from the Disputed Lands; the victorious cities then swept across the Stepstones with armies and fleets under Craghas Drahar. Their conquest initially seemed useful to Westerosi lords, since it displaced pirates, but it also placed a new power across important sea lanes. Volantis’s earlier defeat thus forms part of the political background to a later threat that would trouble the Iron Throne.

That threat is voiced in the king’s concern that Volantis’s triarchs might acquire dragons. When the theft of dragon eggs becomes known, the king warns that the cost of a war across the Narrow Sea might have to be borne if necessary to prevent Valyria from rising again. He orders that the missing eggs not be discussed beyond a small circle. The order cannot contain the news: the theft is already common knowledge on Dragonstone, including among its fisherfolk, whose journeys carry whispers onward. The episode connects Volantis to a fear larger than any immediate dispute: the possibility that a powerful city could use dragons to revive the power associated with old Valyria.

A Targaryen claimant’s chosen home

Volantis is also the home of Saera Targaryen, who lives there after leaving Lys. Her location matters to the succession debate following King Jaehaerys’s death. Among the claims examined by the assembled lords are those of three rival competitors from Essos, each a grandson of Jaehaerys through Saera and each born to a different father. One arrives with considerable wealth and a dwarf elephant; the gifts he distributes to poorer lords help his claim, though the elephant does not. Their presence brings Saera’s descendants from Volantis into a contest over the Iron Throne.

Saera herself is alive, only thirty-four, and her own claim is described as stronger than those of her bastard sons. Yet she does not travel to Westeros to press it. When asked whether she intends to return, she indicates that she has a kingdom of her own in Volantis. The remark presents the city not simply as a place of exile but as the setting for a life she has chosen, beyond the court and succession she left behind. Her absence is consequential: the lords consider her sons’ claims, while the woman whose descent gives those claims their basis remains in Volantis.

Her residence there also marks a personal separation from her family. Alysanne sends Saera letters secretly from time to time, but receives no replies. Jaehaerys regards Saera as dead to him, while the queen’s efforts to reach her go unanswered. Volantis consequently stands at the far end of a broken family connection as well as at the center of an international succession question: it is where Saera has established herself, and from where her sons’ competing claims reach the deliberations in Westeros.

A welcoming stop on a Targaryen journey

Volantis serves a different role when Daemon Targaryen and Laena Velaryon travel through Essos after their marriage. Although some accounts portray their journey as a venture to Valyria, the narrative distinguishes that romantic version from their actual route. They fly first to Pentos, continue across the Disputed Lands to Old Volantis, and then travel up the Rhoyne to Qohor and Norvos. The couple receive a warm welcome in Old Volantis, as they had in Pentos, even though their reception in Qohor and Norvos is less enthusiastic.

Their journey makes the dragons themselves a public spectacle. Crowds turn out wherever the riders go to see Vhagar and Caraxes. In this account, Volantis is not a battlefield or merely a name in a succession claim; it is a city that receives the Targaryen prince and his Velaryon bride while they travel beyond Westeros. The welcome also sits within a wider political context: the cities of Essos have their own interests and rivalries, and Daemon’s presence matters to them beyond the novelty of the dragons.

Refuge and the collapse of House Rogare

Volantis becomes a destination again during the ruin of House Rogare. When Lysaro Rogare’s scheme to restore the bank’s depleted funds through a short victorious war fails, demands for deposits overwhelm the bank, and he flees Lys with a hundred Unsullied, servants, and three bed slaves, leaving his family behind. The flight fractures the family’s fortunes across the Free Cities. Drako escapes to Volantis on one of his galleys, while Lysaro is eventually captured at Volon Therys as he waits for a boat across the Rhoyne.

The surviving Unsullied fight to protect Lysaro, but only twenty remain with him by the time he is surrounded at the docks. After his capture, he is sent downriver to Volantis. The Triarchs offer him to his brother Drako for a price; Drako refuses and proposes that the Volantenes sell Lysaro back to Lys instead. Lysaro is accordingly returned to the city he had abandoned, chained aboard a Volantene slave ship. The episode gives Volantis a starkly practical place in the family’s downfall: it is both Drako’s escape route and the power through which Lysaro is transferred back to face the consequences of the bank’s collapse.

Across these episodes, Volantis is defined less by a single local history than by the traffic of power through it. It is a defeated rival whose former enemies become a new maritime force, Saera’s chosen home and the origin point of her sons’ claims, a city that welcomes Targaryen dragonriders, and a refuge whose rulers can decide the fate of a fleeing banker. Its repeated appearances show how closely the histories of Westeros and the Free Cities are entangled, even when the decisive action takes place elsewhere.