Aegon’s Conquest united most of Westeros under Aegon I Targaryen and his sisters, making conquest the foundation of the realm later called the Seven Kingdoms. Its familiar dates disguise a longer and less complete process: the decisive campaigns preceded Aegon’s formal coronation, and Dorne resisted his rule long after that public declaration of kingship.

Scope and chronology

The Citadel’s histories use Aegon’s Conquest as the dividing point between years Before the Conquest and After the Conquest. But the date is a convention, not the mark of a single victory. More than two years separated Aegon’s landing from his coronation at Oldtown, and even that ceremony did not bring every kingdom under his authority. Attempts to subdue Dorne continued through Aegon’s reign and into the reigns of his sons, making the war’s actual conclusion impossible to date precisely.

The beginning of Aegon’s reign is likewise often misplaced. His landing took place at the mouth of the Blackwater Rush, beneath the three hills where King’s Landing would later rise. Aegon and his descendants commemorated the landing, but Aegon counted his reign from the day the High Septon crowned and anointed him at the Starry Sept in Oldtown. By then, the three major battles of the Wars of Conquest had already been fought. In the Citadel’s chronology, much of the actual conquering therefore falls in 2–1 BC, before the reign’s official starting point.

The landing and the claim to rule

Before setting out, Aegon sent a common declaration throughout Westeros: those who submitted would retain their lands and titles; those who resisted would be defeated. The message turned a military expedition into a claim over the whole continent. Aegon’s force landed on the northern bank of the Blackwater Rush, where the three hills overlooked a small fishing village and the remains of earlier forts. The river mouth had been claimed by rival powers, but it was undefended, and the nearby lesser lords had little reason to defend their nominal overlord, Harren the Black.

The conquest’s public symbols helped make the claim visible. Aegon’s red, three-headed dragon on a black field adopted the heraldic language of Westerosi lords, although Valyrian dragonlords had not used such banners. At his first coronation, Queen Visenya placed a ruby-studded Valyrian steel circlet on his head, while Queen Rhaenys proclaimed him king. The lords and knights cheered, and the common people cheered louder still. The ceremony presented the foreign dragonlord not only as a victor but as a ruler taking a place within Westeros’s political customs.

Campaigns and resistance

After the coronation, Aegon divided his forces across several fronts. Orys Baratheon led the greater part of the host south toward Storm’s End, accompanied by Rhaenys on Meraxes. The fleet sailed north toward Gulltown under Daemon Velaryon, with Visenya riding Vhagar, while Aegon marched northwest toward Harrenhal. The offensives met serious resistance: Storm’s End’s bannermen ambushed Orys’s advance, an Arryn fleet defeated the Targaryen fleet off Gulltown, and Harren the Black’s sons attacked Aegon’s forces after the Battle of the Reeds.

The defenders could win engagements and inflict heavy losses, but they could not match the dragons’ power to strike across a battlefield. Visenya burned the ships that had defeated the Targaryen fleet. Rhaenys sent Meraxes against the forests sheltering the stormlander lords, turning their refuge into a barrier of fire. Balerion attacked Harren’s returning longboats from the sky, killing Harren’s sons. The campaign’s pattern was not the absence of resistance, but the inability of conventional forces to make their victories hold against dragonfire.

Dorne exposed the limits of that advantage. After the submission of the Three Sisters and the Iron Islands, Dorne alone remained outside Aegon’s rule. Diplomacy failed to persuade Princess Meria Martell to join the realm, and in 4 AC Rhaenys returned to Dorne on Meraxes. Her attack set Planky Town ablaze; fewer than a hundred people died, most by drowning as they fled into the river, but the attack began the First Dornish War.

Aegon and Orys advanced by separate mountain passes with large forces, yet the Dornish did not offer a pitched battle. They withdrew, burned crops, poisoned wells and left the invaders to contend with scarcity, heat and difficult terrain. On the march toward Hellholt, Lord Harlan Tyrell lost a quarter of his men and almost all his horses before reaching an abandoned castle. Orys’s knights faced blocked and twisting passes, falling rocks and archers; when a rockfall trapped them during their retreat, the force was defeated and Orys was captured. Aegon had successes of his own, taking Skyreach by storm and winning Yronwood after a short siege, but these gains did not end Dornish resistance.

Coronation and the limits of unification

When Aegon approached Oldtown, its gates stood open. Lord Manfred Hightower chose submission rather than battle, influenced by the High Septon’s vision that resistance would bring the destruction of Oldtown and its religious and scholarly institutions. Three days later, in the Starry Sept, the High Septon anointed Aegon and proclaimed him king of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm. The title named a united kingdom even though Dorne had not submitted and would remain outside it for more than a century.

The scale of this second coronation differed sharply from the first. Only a handful of lords had witnessed the crowning at the Blackwater; hundreds attended in Oldtown, and tens of thousands cheered as Aegon rode through the city on Balerion. Maesters and archmaesters of the Citadel were among the witnesses. The Oldtown ceremony, rather than the landing-day crowning, became fixed as the start of Aegon’s reign. Aegon then chose not to rule from Oldtown or Dragonstone: he declared that his court would be established in the new town rising on the three hills, King’s Landing, and that he would sit on the Iron Throne made from the weapons of his defeated foes.

Inheritance and the conquest’s political memory

The realm created by conquest later required decisions about who could inherit its central throne. At the Great Council of 101 AC, Corlys Velaryon and Princess Rhaenys supported their son Laenor’s claim, but the assembled lords chose Viserys Targaryen by an overwhelming margin. The result was later understood as a precedent excluding women, and male descendants through women, from succession to the Iron Throne. The conquest had joined kingdoms under one king; later councils and coronations continued to determine how that kingship could pass.

During the civil war of Viserys’s descendants, rival claimants also used the visible objects and ceremonies associated with kingship. Aegon II was crowned with Aegon the Conqueror’s iron-and-ruby crown, while Rhaenyra was crowned on Dragonstone with the crown of Jaehaerys the Conciliator. These later ceremonies did not repeat the Conquest, but they show how its founding imagery endured: a crown, a public proclamation and a claim over the same united realm could still be used to assert rival authority. The Conquest’s lasting achievement was therefore both territorial and institutional, but the difference between claiming the Seven Kingdoms and securing uncontested rule remained part of its legacy.