The Ban on Faith Militias

The Ban on Faith Militias was the royal prohibition that broke and outlawed the Faith’s armed orders, including the Warrior’s Sons and the Poor Fellows. Its lasting significance lay in the settlement that followed: Jaehaerys Targaryen refused to restore the orders, yet offered the Faith protection through the Iron Throne and sought to draw former enemies into royal service rather than continue a war against them.

Origins and Religious Conflict

The ban emerged from the rupture between the Iron Throne and the Faith during Maegor I’s reign. Maegor’s taking of a second wife in 39 AC, against the wishes of the High Septon and King Aenys, shattered the fragile understanding between crown and Starry Sept. The denunciation that followed helped set armed religious resistance in motion: the Swords and Stars took up arms alongside pious lords who feared the gods more than their king. Later, the orders were broken and outlawed, but the prohibition did not erase the grievance or the political danger associated with it.

By the sixth year of Maegor’s reign, opposition was again visible. Septon Moon led thousands of the Faithful across the Reach toward Oldtown, intending to confront the High Septon and demand that he denounce Maegor and lift the ban on the military orders. Lords who arrived with their levies joined the march rather than attack it. The episode showed that the prohibition had become more than a measure against armed groups: its continuation was a public test of whether the Faith’s authority would accommodate the king’s rule.

Jaehaerys’s Settlement

Jaehaerys inherited the consequences of that conflict, but not the same conditions that had helped ignite it. When he and Alysanne Targaryen married, he judged that their situation differed from the earlier marriage of his brother Aegon and Rhaena. The Starry Sept did not denounce the marriage; the Warrior’s Sons and the Poor Fellows had been broken and outlawed; and the High Septon was cautious rather than eager to provoke a new confrontation. At the Wall, two thousand former Poor Fellows wore the black cloaks of the Night’s Watch, the only concentration that Jaehaerys considered potentially troublesome.

The king also treated the ban as part of a broader effort to prevent religious dispute from becoming rebellion. He intended to travel through the realm with Alysanne, meet lords and smallfolk, and hear local grievances, accompanied by their dragons. He sent preachers rather than armed men to speak in support of the queen and the royal marriage. The contrast was deliberate: where earlier rulers had answered hostile words with force, Jaehaerys sought to prevent denunciation from taking hold before it could again gather armed followers.

No Restoration, but No War of Retaliation

At his coronation in Oldtown, Jaehaerys met Ser Joffrey Doggett, the self-proclaimed Grand Captain of the outlawed Warrior’s Sons. Doggett and Lady Lucinda Tully urged the young king to reverse Maegor’s decrees and restore the Swords and Stars. Jaehaerys refused. He maintained that the Faith did not need its own swords because it had the protection of the Iron Throne.

That refusal did not mean that Jaehaerys intended to pursue the former members without distinction. He rescinded Maegor’s promised rewards for the heads of the Warrior’s Sons and the Poor Fellows, rejecting a renewed campaign against his own people while also making clear that treason and rebellion would not be tolerated. He told Doggett that the Warrior’s Sons no longer existed and that Doggett’s vows to them had ended, but offered him a new role as a knight of the Kingsguard. Doggett accepted, laying his sword at the king’s feet. The outlawed order was not restored; its former captain was instead incorporated into the institution that served the crown.

Continuing Political Significance

The policy balanced religious authority against royal control of armed force. The Faith could receive the king’s protection, but its military orders would not be revived as an independent power. This distinction was especially significant because the Crown’s reconciliation strategy also relied on bringing former opponents into court and councils, encouraging noble families to send children to serve there, and arranging marriages across regional divisions. The ban constrained one source of organized resistance, while other forms of participation offered routes back into the realm’s political life.

The distinction between protection and restoration also shaped the later succession crisis. During the dispute over whether Daemon Targaryen or Rhaenyra Targaryen should succeed Viserys, Otto Hightower’s party worried that religious resistance could again become entangled with royal legitimacy. But Jaehaerys’s settlement had established a different expectation: the Faith’s standing did not depend on restoring the Swords and Stars. The ban endured, while the crown presented itself as the guardian of the Faith and reserved the use of armed authority to the king’s peace.