House Arryn

House Arryn is the ruling house of the Vale, and its history in Fire & Blood repeatedly tests how inheritance becomes authority: Ronnel Arryn yields to Aegon the Conqueror without a battle, while later Arryn rulers face rebellion, disputed succession, and the need to secure allies. The family’s story joins the incorporation of the Vale into the realm to a longer struggle over who may legitimately hold its lordship.

The Vale’s Submission

When Aegon’s Conquest began, the boy king Ronnel Arryn ruled the Vale under the regency of his mother, Sharra Arryn. Sharra first prepared to resist: she strengthened Gulltown, gathered a host at the Bloody Gate, and enlarged the garrisons of Stone, Snow, and Sky, the waycastles guarding the approach to the Eyrie. She also sought an alliance with Aegon against Harren the Black, asking for the lands east of the Green Fork of the Trident in return for the Vale’s support. Her diplomacy, like her defenses, did not secure the independence of her house.

Visenya Targaryen bypassed the guarded approaches by flying Vhagar directly into the Eyrie’s inner courtyard. Sharra came out with guards to confront her, but found Ronnel seated on Visenya’s knee, absorbed by the dragon. The encounter ended not with a siege but with the surrender of the Vale’s symbols of kingship: Sharra sent Visenya the regent’s coronet, Ronnel’s small crown, and the Falcon Crown worn by the Arryn kings, along with the garrison’s swords. It was later said that Ronnel flew three times around the summit of the Giant’s Lance and landed a lord rather than a king. Visenya’s bloodless victory brought the Vale into Aegon’s realm and preserved the ruling family as its lords.

The settlement also became part of Aegon’s broader effort to bind former enemies into a single realm. His court welcomed children from formerly hostile houses, and the royal family fostered marriages between regions. Ronnel married a daughter of Torrhen Stark of Winterfell. The match linked the Arryn and Stark houses across the distance between the Vale and the North, making marriage one of the means by which conquest was consolidated after the armies had moved on.

Rebellion and the Loss of the Crown

The arrangement did not prevent conflict within House Arryn. During the rebellion against Aenys I Targaryen, Lord Allard Royce of Runestone assembled loyal bannermen and marched against the Eyrie, where Ronnel’s brother Jonos Arryn had seized power and called himself King of Mountain and Vale. Royce’s forces defeated Jonos’s supporters and demanded the release of Ronnel. Jonos instead sent his brother through the Moon Door, killing the king whose place he had taken.

The Eyrie could resist an ordinary assault, but not the arrival of Maegor I Targaryen on Balerion. Faced with the dragon, the garrison surrendered Jonos to Lord Royce and opened the Moon Door again; Jonos suffered the same fate he had inflicted on Ronnel. The surrender spared the pretender’s followers from being burned, but Maegor executed them after taking the castle. Hubert Arryn, a cousin of the dead brothers, was installed as Lord of the Vale. His six sons, born to a wife of House Royce, were taken as reassurance that the Arryn succession had been secured. In this episode, dynastic continuity depended both on force from outside the house and on a replacement whose children promised a next generation of heirs.

Alliances in the Dance

Centuries later, House Arryn again mattered to a struggle over the Iron Throne, this time through Jeyne Arryn, the Maid of the Vale. In the early calculations of the Dance of the Dragons, Daemon Targaryen hoped she might bring the Eyrie to Rhaenyra Targaryen’s side. The Vale was not yet a settled ally: Daemon expected Aegon II to seek the support of the Iron Islands, while the opposing council judged the North too distant to determine the war quickly. For either faction, the Vale’s allegiance was a political possibility to be won, not an automatic consequence of its name or past loyalties.

Jeyne ultimately pledged her support to Rhaenyra’s cause through Jacaerys Velaryon. After he came to treat with her, Jeyne knelt before him and had her warriors swear their swords to him. The episode gives the house a role in the war through the decisions of its ruling lady: the Vale’s military support was not merely presumed but publicly committed. Elsewhere in Jacaerys’s northern mission, the need to negotiate continued. At White Harbor, Desmond Manderly linked his support to an old grievance and to a promised marriage between his youngest daughter and Jacaerys’s brother Joffrey. Such arrangements show the broader political setting in which House Arryn’s pledge operated: alliances were secured through negotiation, public submission, and prospective kinship as well as through shared opposition to a rival claimant.

Jeyne Arryn’s Death and the Succession Dispute

Jeyne’s death reopened the question of who could speak for House Arryn. In the last days of 134 AC, she died at Gulltown, aged forty, after a cold settled in her chest. She was at the Motherhouse of Maris on a rocky island in the harbor, in the arms of her companion Jessamyn Redfort. Before her death, Jeyne dictated a testament naming her cousin Joffrey Arryn as heir. He had served her for ten years as Knight of the Bloody Gate and defended the Vale against wildlings from the hills.

The designation faced several rival claims. Joffrey was only a fourth cousin, while Arnold Arryn, Jeyne’s first cousin, stood closer by blood. Arnold had twice tried to depose her and was now confined after those rebellions; years in the Eyrie’s sky cells and the dungeons beneath the Gates of the Moon had left him mad. His son Eldric Arryn, by contrast, was sane, politically capable, and ambitious, and advanced his father’s claim. Many Vale lords backed Eldric, arguing that settled inheritance law could not be displaced by the choice of a dying woman. Their objection set written or customary precedence against Jeyne’s right to designate a successor.

A third claimant, Isembard Arryn, represented a wealthy, distant branch of the family based in Gulltown. The Gulltown Arryns had separated from their noble kin during Jaehaerys I Targaryen’s reign and prospered through trade. Isembard used his resources to bribe lesser lords and bring sellswords across the Narrow Sea. The rival claims thus drew on distinct sources of power: closeness of blood, Jeyne’s testament and Joffrey’s service, and the money and armed support Isembard could command.

Recognition and the Wider Realm

The conflict was settled by more than family argument. In the campaign of 135 AC, Ser Robert Rowan’s force suffered heavily crossing the mountains: by the time the survivors reached the Bloody Gate, a third had died in attacks, cold, or hunger. Robert Rowan had been killed by a boulder during a wildling attack, and Bloody Ben Blackwood took command. Joffrey Arryn saw that the exhausted survivors could not strengthen his position in the war; they would be a burden rather than a useful army. The incident underlines the difficulty of defending the Vale: the Bloody Gate was both a refuge where survivors could find food and warmth and a threshold that an army might reach too depleted to fight.

By the great gathering of lords in King’s Landing in 136 AC, Lord Oakenfist and Bloody Ben Blackwood had forced Isembard, Eldric, Arnold, and their supporters to bend the knee to Joffrey as their liege. Joffrey attended the gathering with Isembard and other Vale lords. The outcome did not erase the rival claims; it turned a contested designation into an acknowledged lordship through military pressure and public homage. Isembard’s later proposal for master of coin also shows how a defeated claimant could remain consequential in the realm’s politics: Oakenfist put forward his name, and the lords selected him for the office. House Arryn’s history therefore ends this period not with a simple rule of blood, but with succession secured through testament, service, force, and recognition by other lords.