Barefoot Army

The Barefoot Army was the Shepherd’s popular following in King’s Landing during the Dance of the Dragons. It became a force capable of attacking the Dragonpit and helping bring about the deaths of the dragons inside, but it was not a lasting army or government: its numbers and influence diminished, and its surviving leadership was captured and condemned after King Aegon II’s return. Its brief ascendancy shows how religious language, popular grievance, and a collapse of royal authority could turn a crowd into a threat to the ruling order.

Origins and Appeal

The Barefoot Army took shape around the Shepherd, a prophet who presented the dragons as demons and their presence as an offense requiring action. When he urged his listeners to cast aside fine clothes and shoes and walk barefoot, thousands followed his instruction. The name therefore expressed both a visible practice and a shared allegiance. The Shepherd’s message placed the poor and humble among those worthy of salvation, while condemning the pride and wealth of lords, knights, and rich men. His following was religiously framed, but its appeal also carried a challenge to the social hierarchy.

The movement grew within the disorder that followed Rhaenyra Targaryen’s flight from King’s Landing. The city had no dependable law or protection, and different claimants and factions held power on separate hills. The Shepherd himself did not claim a crown, yet his followers gathered in large numbers and acted collectively. At the approach to the Dragonpit, a cry for the dragons’ destruction drew an initial crowd of ten thousand; as people moved through the streets toward the hill, the number doubled. That growth suggests a movement able to attract participants beyond the prophet’s closest adherents, though the evidence does not describe a formal command structure or regular military organization.

Assault on the Dragonpit

The Shepherd called his followers to attack the Dragonpit on Rhaenys’s Hill, where the royal dragons were housed. Rhaenyra Targaryen ordered forces at the Old Gate and Dragon Gate to disperse the crowd, seize the Shepherd, and protect the dragons. The orders did not stop the gathering. Gold cloaks sent from the Dragon Gate could not force their way through the crowd and withdrew; the messenger dispatched to the Old Gate never arrived. The Dragonkeepers, the pit’s own guards, numbered seventy-seven, with fewer than fifty on watch that night. They were overwhelmed as attackers entered through lesser doors and windows.

The assault had consequences far beyond the immediate fight. Four dragons were housed in the Dragonpit, and the noise of the attack roused them before the attackers reached them. Confined within the building and restrained by chains, the dragons could not escape or use flight to evade the crowd. The chronicles disagree about the number of human dead, but the attack ended with the deaths of the dragons in the pit. The Shepherd’s followers had achieved their central immediate objective: the royal dragons there were gone. Their victory, however, did not restore order or establish the Shepherd as a ruler.

From Religious Following to Political Power

After the dragons’ deaths, the Shepherd turned his preaching toward the wealthy and highborn. He urged his followers to reject silks and fine shoes and adopt rough clothing and bare feet. Thousands complied, but thousands more turned away, and the crowds attending his sermons grew smaller each night. The movement’s changing fortunes were visible in this decline: the shared cause that had gathered a vast crowd at the Dragonpit did not sustain the same level of participation once the immediate threat of the dragons had passed.

The Shepherd nevertheless retained enough influence to call his followers to defend the Dragonpit ruins when Lord Borros Baratheon moved against them. This time, fewer than three hundred answered, and many fled once the assault began. Borros’s knights advanced from the west while Ser Perkin the Flea and his men came up from the southern slope. They captured the Shepherd among the dragon heads. The contrast with the earlier attack was stark: a crowd that had doubled as it marched toward the hill had become a small, failing force unable to protect its leader.

Defeat and Significance

After the Shepherd was brought before Aegon II, the king condemned him and his followers to death. On the final day of the year, two hundred forty-one of the most fervent followers were executed along the route from Cobbler’s Square toward the Dragonpit. The Shepherd was put to death at the hill itself. The thoroughfare was thereafter known as Shepherd’s Way, leaving the movement’s name attached to the cityscape even after its organization and leadership had been destroyed.

The Barefoot Army’s history is therefore a rapid sequence of mobilization, victory, decline, and suppression. Its attack removed the dragons from the Dragonpit, but the movement could neither secure lasting authority nor preserve its strength once the immediate campaign ended. Its changing numbers—from a crowd that swelled on the way to the hill, to thousands who adopted the Shepherd’s practices, and finally to fewer than three hundred defenders—make its rise and collapse legible as political events as well as religious ones. The episode also exposes the fragility of royal power in a city where the king’s forces could not initially reach the crowd, and where control returned only after a rival lord’s armed intervention.