The Great Houses of Westeros, Explained

The War of the Five Kings is, underneath the battles and the dragons, a family feud. Every claim to the Iron Throne runs through a marriage, a birth, or a secret about who really fathered whom. This guide maps the five great houses at the heart of Game of Thrones — Stark, Lannister, Baratheon, Targaryen, and Tully — and the in-laws who bind them together.

How to read this graph

Each circle is a character, coloured by the house they were born into: grey for Stark, blue for Tully, crimson for Lannister, gold for Baratheon, and violet for Targaryen. Lines join parents to children and spouses to one another. Crucially, the tree shows the true bloodlines — so Cersei's children link back to Jaime, and Jon Snow links back to Rhaegar Targaryen, not to the men the realm believed were their fathers. Click any node to focus on it; drag to rearrange.

House Stark — the wolves of Winterfell

Lord Rickard Stark's children — Brandon, Ned, Lyanna, and Benjen — were scattered and killed by the events of Robert's Rebellion. It fell to Ned and his wife Catelyn Tully to raise the next generation of Starks at Winterfell, only for the family to be broken again by the War of the Five Kings.

House Lannister — gold and secrets

Tywin Lannister built his children into the most powerful family in the realm. But the family's defining secret is the one at the top of this tree: Cersei's three royal children were not King Robert's at all.

House Baratheon — the storm kings

Robert Baratheon won the Iron Throne by force, but his line was hollow: his marriage to Cersei produced no true heirs, and his only blood ran in bastards like Gendry. When Robert died, his brothers Stannis and Renly each crowned themselves — and the Baratheons tore one another apart.

House Targaryen — fire and blood

The Mad King Aerys II and his sister-wife Rhaella were the last Targaryens to sit the throne before Robert's Rebellion swept them away. Their surviving children, Viserys and Daenerys, grew up in exile — until Daenerys hatched three dragons and came home to take back the realm.

House Tully — family, duty, honour

House Tully of Riverrun is the hinge that connects the others. Hoster Tully's daughters married into power — Catelyn to Ned Stark in the North, Lysa to Jon Arryn in the Vale — making the Tullys kin to half the realm's claimants.

The secret at the heart of the realm

The biggest revelation of the series is hidden in plain sight on this graph. The boy everyone knew as Ned Stark's bastard, Jon Snow, was in truth the son of Lyanna Stark and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen — born of a secret marriage and hidden away to keep him safe from Robert. That makes Jon a trueborn Targaryen heir, and the nephew of the woman he comes to love, Daenerys.

Two boy-kings, one war

Nothing captures the War of the Five Kings better than two of its rival crowns side by side: Robb Stark, proclaimed King in the North by his bannermen, and Joffrey Baratheon, the cruel boy who held the Iron Throne. Both were dead before the war was over.

House by house