The Targaryen Family Tree, Explained

Three HBO series, three hundred years, one family. House of the Dragon opens near the top of this tree, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms lands two-thirds of the way down it, and Game of Thrones closes it out — and almost nothing on screen tells you how the three connect. They connect through one man's descendants. Every Targaryen in every one of those shows comes from Aegon the Conqueror, and nearly all the killing is over which of his lines has the better claim.

How to read this tree

Colour is time, not house. Everyone here is a Targaryen or married one, so house colours would tell you nothing; instead each band is an era — the Conquest, the Old King's long peace, the Dance of the Dragons, the broken realm after it, the Blackfyre century that Dunk and Egg lives in, and the last dragons. Lines run parent to child, and between spouses. Two things this graph does that the shows do not. It draws the parentage the story eventually admits to rather than the one the court was told, so Rhaenyra's first three sons hang off Harwin Strong. And it draws a sister-marriage as both a marriage and a sibling line — which lets you watch the habit run straight down the spine of the family for three hundred years. One more thing worth knowing before you scroll. Only about half of these people have ever been filmed. Where a face is a photograph, you have seen that character on screen; where it is a painting, nobody has — no adaptation has ever put them in front of a camera, and the portrait is our own.

Aegon's Conquest — where all of it starts

Aegon Targaryen came to Westeros with two sisters, three dragons and no particular claim to anything, and inside two years he held six of the seven kingdoms. He married both sisters. Visenya, the elder, rode Vhagar and founded the Kingsguard; Rhaenys, the younger, rode Meraxes and was killed on her in Dorne — the one kingdom he never took. That is the root of the entire chart, and it already contains the family's two lifelong habits: marry your sister, and settle the argument with a dragon. Every claim below this row is a claim to be his rightful heir.

The Old King, and the council that broke the realm

Aegon's own sons ruled badly and briefly. His grandson Jaehaerys ruled for fifty-five years — the longest and most peaceful reign the dynasty ever managed — and then outlived every son he had. That left the succession to a Great Council in 101 AC, choosing between two grandchildren: Rhaenys, daughter of his dead eldest son, and Viserys, son of his second. They chose Viserys, and everyone understood why. Rhaenys is remembered as the Queen Who Never Was, and the precedent set in that hall — that a male cousin outranks a female heir — is the precedent the next war is fought over.

The Dance of the Dragons

Viserys I named his daughter Rhaenyra heir, made the lords swear to her, and then remarried and had four more children — sons. He never chose between the promise and the boys, and when he died in his sleep the two halves of his family crowned themselves within a week of each other. The historians call it the Dance of the Dragons. It killed most of the dragons and very nearly the family. The sides are easy to read off the graph once you know the trick. It is his first wife's daughter against his second wife's sons, and almost everyone else picks a side by marriage.

The king who was afraid of dragons

Rhaenyra was eaten by her half-brother's dragon in front of her son. That son, Aegon III, got the throne anyway — married to Aegon II's daughter, because the only way to end the war was to marry the two claims together — and spent his whole reign refusing to go near a dragon. The last one died during it, a stunted thing barely the size of a cat, and a family that had conquered a continent from the air became a family with a surname.

The Unworthy, and the black dragon

A hundred and fifty dragonless years later the dynasty produced Aegon IV, remembered for a single sentence. Dying, he legitimised every bastard he had ever fathered — and he had fathered a great many, on a great many women. He had also fathered a son on his cousin Daena and handed the boy the family's Valyrian steel sword, Blackfyre. Daemon Blackfyre raised it as a banner within four years, and five rebellions across the next seventy come straight out of that deathbed pardon.

Two of those bastards shaped everything that came after. Bittersteel carried the Blackfyre cause into exile and built the Golden Company to keep feeding it, which is why a sellsword army is still landing in Westeros a century later. His half-brother went the other way entirely, and ended up somewhere no one watching Game of Thrones would place a Targaryen bastard.

Dunk and Egg — the fourth son of a fourth son

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms picks this family up at its least royal. Its Egg is Aegon, fourth son of Maekar, who was himself the fourth son of Daeron II — a boy far enough from the throne that he could squire for a hedge knight without anyone much minding. Then his uncle Baelor, the best of them, took a blow at a tourney and died of it. The king who followed reigned bookishly and died childless. Egg's eldest brother drank himself to death; his second brother drank wildfire, believing it would turn him into a dragon; and his third brother, Aemon, was offered the crown and refused it. Aegon the Unlikely reached the throne by being the last one standing, which is precisely what his name says.

The brother who refused the crown outlived him by decades, and you have already met him. He is the blind old man in the rookery at Castle Black, telling a bastard out of Winterfell exactly what it costs to give up a family name.

Summerhall, and the Mad King

Aegon V wanted the dragons back. Something at Summerhall went catastrophically wrong on the night he tried for them, and it killed him, his heir Duncan, and the hedge knight who had raised him. Rhaegar was born that same night, in the smoke. What followed was one short reign and then Aerys II, who married his sister on a woods witch's promise that their line would produce the prince who was promised. He began charming and ended burning men alive in his own throne room, and three hundred years of Targaryen rule finished with his own Kingsguard putting a sword through his back.

Robert Baratheon had Targaryen blood too

The rebellion that destroyed this family was led by a man who was part of it. Aegon V's youngest daughter Rhaelle was married off to Storm's End; her son Steffon fathered Robert. That makes Robert the Mad King's first cousin once removed, and Aegon V's great-grandson — which is the reason his claim was arguable at all, rather than simply conquest. Trace the line on the graph and the rebellion stops looking like an outsider toppling a dynasty. It is a cousin war.

The last dragons

What was left after Robert's Rebellion was two children on a boat. Viserys sold his sister to a Dothraki khal for an army and was paid in molten gold; Daenerys hatched three dragons out of a funeral pyre and became the first Targaryen in a hundred and fifty years to have any. And there was a third that nobody counted. Rhaegar's marriage to Lyanna Stark was real, and secret, and their son was raised in the North under another name — which makes him Daenerys's nephew, the senior claim, and the man who kills her.

Where the shows and the books disagree

Two-thirds of this tree has never been filmed. House of the Dragon covers the top of it, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms covers one slice near the bottom, Game of Thrones covers the end — and the two centuries in between exist only in Fire & Blood and a handful of appendices. Where a show has put something on screen, this tree follows the show. Where nothing has, it follows the book. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because Fire & Blood is written as a disputed history: one maester assembling three witnesses who contradict each other and none of whom were in the room.

Who was still standing

Everyone in the top two-thirds of this chart died centuries before Game of Thrones begins, so the only count worth making is the last hundred years — Summerhall to the Iron Throne. Below is that stretch of the family, and the close kin who married into it. One of them is alive when the series ends, and the peace he is given requires him to go north of the Wall and stop using the name.

Era by era