The Insane Reign of Baelor the Blessed

This is the tenth video of my Targaryen Kings  series, in which I explain and analyze the reigns of each king in the Targaryen dynasty. Baelor the  First is the ninth Targaryen king, but all the Targaryens post-Aegon III are only covered briefly  in The World of Ice & Fire and sporadically across the ASOIAF books. Fire & Blood hardly gave enough  objective information about the first seven kings, so we know even less about the other ten. Baelor is the younger brother of Daeron the Young Dragon,

and the second son of Aegon III and  Daenaera Velaryon. Daeron was obsessed with conquering Dorne, so that ended up killing him  at the age of 18, as well as over 50,000 people. Daeron had neither wife nor child, so upon his  death in the Dornish desert, his brother Baelor ascended the Iron Throne at the age of 17. A  year earlier, he married his eldest sister Daena, though the marriage was never consummated and  was eventually dissolved, and she also gave birth to a bastard who started a series

of wars that  plagued the Targaryens for generations. When Daeron conquered Dorne the first time, he  took 14 noble hostages back with him to King’s Landing. The Dornish rebelled anyways, and  killed King Daeron, so the Hand of the King, Viserys, put all the Dornish hostages in the  dungeons to be hanged. This Viserys is the brother of Aegon III, and uncle of Daeron and  Baelor. By 161 AC, when Baelor became King, Viserys had already been Hand since the final  years of his brother’s reign. He w

ould remain Hand of the King throughout both of his nephew’s  reigns as well, providing strong administration while Daeron warred and while Baelor prayed. Baelor’s cousin, Prince Aegon the Unworthy, even imprisoned his own paramour, who was  Dornish. Instead of executing these 15 hostages, Baelor’s first act as King was to pardon them all.  He said he would “bind up the wounds” with Dorne and make peace “with neither sword nor army,”  the opposite approach that Daeron took. The first warning sig

n that Baelor might not  be entirely sane was when he walked the entire way from King’s Landing to Sunspear barefoot.  According to fan calculations, that’s a distance of around 1,000 miles. It would take over a month  to travel there by horse, and Baelor walked. Barefoot. Because the Seven told him to do it.  That’s like walking from George Martin’s home in Santa Fe to Zacatecas, Mexico. Baelor walked while  the 15 Dornish hostages rode horses behind him. This would have shamed any other king,

but Baelor,  for all his many faults, was not prideful. Baelor stopped at Castle Wyl, where his cousin  Aemon the Dragonknight was being held captive, naked in a cage. He’d been fighting in Dorne with  King Daeron. Lord Wyl refused to release Aemon, so Baelor gave his cousin a prayer  and swore he would return. He continued walking through the treacherous  Boneway, where thousands of men had died before. He finally made it to Sunspear and made peace with  the Martells. To seal the pact, an eight

-year-old Daeron was betrothed to Princess Myriah Martell.  Prince Martell also agreed to command Lord Wyl to release Aemon the Dragonknight. When Baelor returned, Aemon’s cage was now suspended above a pit of vipers. Aemon begged  Baelor to leave him, and go find help in the Marches. Instead, Baelor said the gods would  protect him. So he stepped right into the viper pit, was bitten six times, and was pulled up by  Aemon, who then put Baelor on his back and leaped to safety. Aemon the Dragonkni

ght delivered  King Baelor, who had entered a coma from all the snake venom, from Castle Wyl to Blackhaven to  Storm’s End, being treated by maesters at every stop. Over half a year later, Baelor was well  enough to go home and sit the Iron Throne. His ten-year reign was about to really begin,  and the realm was about to see how different Baelor was from his predecessors. His father,  Aegon III, was dour and very hands-off. He was called the Broken King, and besides his  commitment to peace, Aeg

on had no passions in life. His first son Daeron was quite the  opposite; energetic and hands-on to a fault, and quite passionate for one thing: Dorne.  He undid his father’s peace and got thousands killed in his failed attempts to bring Dorne into  the Kingdom. Baelor was not passionless like his father, nor was he violent like his brother.  He was religious above all else. So religious, that it doomed his life and his reign. First, Baelor convinced the High Septon to dissolve his marriage to h

is sister Daena.  They were wed when he was still Prince Baelor, and they never consummated the marriage. His next  bright idea was to lock away his three sisters in their very own “Court of Beauty'' in the Red  Keep. More accurately, it became known as the Maidenvault, a place where Daena’s, Rhaena’s, and  Elaena’s innocence could be protected from the lusts of other men. Though some said Baelor  couldn’t trust himself not to incestuously fornicate with his sisters. The Maidenvault  was for his

own good, not his sister’s. Daena the Defiant was beautiful and fierce.  She rode well on horseback and was excellent at archery; she used a fancy Dornish bow  her brother Daeron brought back from his conquests. Daena idolized The Young Dragon, and  probably would have been happier to marry him had he not gotten himself killed in Dorne.  But she was stuck with Baelor, and escaped the Maidenvault three separate times disguised  as a servant, once with the help of her cousin Aegon. Daena was so d

efiant that she insisted  on getting pregnant, perhaps just to spite her pious brother. More on that later. Rhaena took after Baelor with her piety and passivity. She didn’t mind being kept in  the Maidenvault, and eventually she became a septa. She was a lot like Naerys, her cousin.  Naerys was religious and gentle and quite frail; she was an awful match for her brother-husband  Aegon the Unworthy. But Naerys was 9 years older than Rhaena. Circumstances (or her father,  Viserys) forced her to w

ed Aegon and eventually die in childbirth. Naerys would have loved  to become a septa like her cousin Rhaena, but Baelor was not king when she married  Aegon, and thus he had no power to save her from a life that ended up killing her. Elaena was Baelor’s youngest sister. She took after Daena, and was rowdy and willful. She hated  being locked away in the Maidenvault. She thought that if she chopped off her hair, it would make  her less beautiful and therefore less likely to entice a man to lust

for her. But Baelor kept  her locked up anyway. Curiously, Elaena had a dragon egg; its shell was white and blonde,  just like her hair. Obviously it never hatched. I’ll discuss the rest of Elaena’s adventurous  life in the next videos of this series. The smallfolk learned to love Baelor; he emptied  the royal treasury for his acts of charity, and one year he gave a loaf of bread to  every citizen of King’s Landing every day. But the lords learned to hate Baelor and his  increasingly erratic, ze

alous decisions. All of Baelor’s decrees were about religion.  He tried to make the Citadel use doves instead of ravens, since doves were a bit holier in  some way. He tried to offer tax exemptions to lords who put their daughters in chastity  belts. Baelor made prostitution illegal, which was very bad for business and bad for  morale. More than a thousand sex workers and their children were exiled from King’s Landing.  Baelor ignored the civil unrest that followed and instead began work on his

passion project: The  Great Sept of Baelor atop Visenya’s Hill. Built of seven crystal towers above a white marble plaza,  with a giant statue of Baelor right out front. The whole thing was a bit ostentatious  and self-aggrandizing for a king who’s not really supposed to be about all that. The High Septon enjoyed more influence under Baelor, and Baelor himself swore the vows of  a septon, refusing to ever marry or father any heirs. In a world so obsessed with having as many  sons as quickly as p

ossible to sure up succession, Baelor was content to spend his reign devoted  to religion and let the throne pass to his uncle Viserys and his side of the family. Viserys was a  fine enough man, but his heir was most unworthy. For the good of the realm, Baelor should’ve had a  son, and protected everyone from Aegon IV. Perhaps the worst outcome of all Baelor’s zealotry  was his insistence on burning books. Any text containing scandalous content or research about  magic and the higher mysteries w

as put in the fires. The Testimony of Mushroom, a salacious  source detailing the many scandals at court during the Dance of the Dragons, for example.  As well as Septon Barth’s Unnatural History, with knowledge coming from one of the greatest  minds in Westerosi history. Fragments of these books survived, but much was lost. Baelor  did not care about education or science if it came at the cost of offending his gods. As the years went on, Baelor spent more and more time praying and fasting to at

one for all the sins  being committed against the Seven. When twins were born to Naerys and Aegon, and died shortly after  their birth, King Baelor fasted for a moon’s turn - or, a month. This nearly killed him. When the High Septon died, Baelor said the gods gave him some type of vision of who should be the  next High Septon: a common, illiterate stonemason named Pate. After High Septon Pate died of a  fever, Baelor believed his replacement should be an 8-year old boy who had the power to work 

miracles and who spoke to the gods via doves. Baelor was sliding into madness, and went fully  off the deep end when his sister and former wife, Daena the Defiant, gave birth to a bastard boy,  Daemon. Baelor started to drink nothing but water, and ate nothing but a tiny amount of bread to stop  his stomach from aching. After 40 days, this time the fasting killed him. He was found collapsed  on the floor near the altar of the Mother. Thus the Septon-King died at the age of 27 after a  10-year l

ong reign. (That sounds pretty pathetic, but Baelor’s reign actually ranks in the 46th  percentile across Targaryen history.) There are some who suspected it was poison, not lack  of food, that killed Baelor. His uncle Viserys had essentially been running the realm as Hand for  decades. Some said that Viserys poisoned Baelor to finally take the throne for himself, while others  said Viserys did it for the good of the realm. Near the end of his reign, Baelor became convinced  that he must convert

all the non-believers in Westeros, which would have caused holy wars  against the North, who worshipped the Old Gods, and the Iron Islands, who worshipped the Drowned  God. If Viserys killed Baelor, it was a decision that may have saved thousands of lives. Let’s talk dragons. The last dragon died in 153 AC during Aegon III’s reign. This was 8 years  before Baelor became king. The dragons were gone, but there were still plenty of eggs from the  Dragonmont and the Dragonpit. Baelor’s sister Elaen

a cherished her egg. A century later, Aegon  V had seven eggs he tried to hatch at Summerhall, the tragic night Rhaegar was born. Baelor  tried to hatch dragon eggs too. Instead of placing them in a fire or doing some type of  blood magic ritual, like Aegon V and Daenerys, Baelor chose to pray over his egg for half  a year. It didn’t work, but it makes you wonder why a religious, nonviolent king like  Baelor would want to bring giant fire-breathing sky lizards back into the world? Maybe Baelor w

asn’t as gentle as the historians say. His descendant Aegon V was one of  the kindest kings in history, and even he wanted to unleash dragons on the lords who opposed  his rule. Maybe Baelor was so committed to the Faith that he wanted to use dragons to force  nonbelievers to accept his religion; maybe this is what Viserys feared, and is what convinced  him to poison Baelor. Viserys was one of the last living Targaryens who witnessed first-hand  the destruction dragons could cause. Although, Vis

erys himself had a dragon egg he cherished as a  boy, and when they were adults, Viserys convinced his brother Aegon III to bring in mages from Essos  to try to hatch a clutch of dragon eggs with some sort of blood magic. There’s something weird going  on with these Targaryens. Aegon III hated dragons so much they called him the Dragonbane, yet even  he tried to bring them back. Baelor was gentle and pious, yet even he tried to hatch dragons. So, maybe we can just blame it on dreams. Maybe Aego

n III and Baelor dreamed of dragons, just like  a hundred years later, each of King Maeker's sons dreamed of dragons. Maybe they knew about Aegon  the Conqueror’s prophecy, and thought they needed a dragon to save humanity. A prophecy about the  end of the world might have been enough to change Aegon and Baelor’s philosophy about dragons. Baelor would not be the last Targaryen king to attempt to regain his ancestral power. For all  his religion, forgiveness, and fasting, Baelor could not change

who he was - a Targaryen - and  he could not suppress his Valyrian dragon-dictator tendencies. It was in his blood. Westeros should be thankful Baelor failed to bring back dragons. If he did, the Blackfyre Rebellions  would have gotten a whole lot messier. In fact, if Baelor wasn’t so zealous, and didn’t annul  his marriage to Daena, she probably wouldn’t have had sex with Aegon the Unworthy, and  thus given birth to Daemon Blackfyre. Baelor is indirectly responsible for generations of  turmoil

for his family and his realm. Let me know in the comments your thoughts about  Baelor. Was his generosity to the smallfolk enough to make him a good king, or was he too weak  and stupid? How would you explain Aegon III and Baelor’s attempts to hatch dragons, even though  it contradicts their characters? The next entry in this series will cover Viserys II’s abbreviated  reign. Thanks for watching and subscribing.