How marriage triggered the Game of Thrones

Marriage for alliance has been part of Game of Thrones since the very first episode. Almost the first thing Robert says to Ned is that he wants Joffrey to marry Sansa, to tie the crown to one of its most powerful Houses. Also in the pilot, Viserys and Illyrio wed Daenerys to Khal Drogo to form an alliance between the Targaryens. It continues throughout the series–after all, we have a Red Wedding and a Purple Wedding, both shocking events around what should have been the completion of an alliance.

What’s more, this seems normal, as the previous generation had done it as well: Rhaegar Targaryen married Elia Martell, Baratheon married Lannister, and Tully married both Stark and Arryn, all of which solidified alliances. But as I read A World of Ice and Fire, it becomes clear that it’s not normal. The history of the Seven Kingdoms after the Targaryen conquest didn’t have regular marriage alliances between the Great Houses. A quick glance at the family trees included in the book–Lannister and Stark–shows that the only marriages with other Great Houses in the past several generations occurred during the generation of Robert’s Rebellion.

This, more than almost anything else, explains why the Game of Thrones exploded into a multi-part civil war right at the point that the story begins….

The idea is fairly simple: when Great Houses are unstable and need to consolidate their holdings, they marry internally. After his incompetent father left the Westerlands weak, Tywin Lannister married his cousin, Joanna Lannister, just as Ned’s father, Rickard Stark, married a Stark cousin, Lyarra. But when they’re internally stable–and have external ambitions–the Great Houses marry each other. And that tends to destabilize the realm.

Aegon’s Conquest of Westeros led to a situation where the latter situation was extremely rare. The power of the Targaryens, embodied in their dragons, meant that ambitious lords could only work for the dragon-riders. Hence, apart from some scattered rebellions following Aegon’s death, most unrest in the realm came from court factions of different Targaryen heirs. This exploded in the first major civil war–The Dance of the Dragons–which had the net effect of killing most of the dragons. As Westeros recovered from the Dance, a new set of Targaryen succession factions began, which culminated in the Blackfyre rebellions. Following the end of those–from a swing of Barristan Selmy’s sword–the situation was, for the first time, ripe for the Great Houses to ally with one another. No dragons, internal stability in each land, and a weak Targaryen king.

The “Southron Ambitions” idea of Rickard Stark and several other Great Houses planning marriage alliances, gets to this (if the text at the link doesn’t show up for you, select that you’ve read A Dance with Dragons–this page is all background, but be careful elsewhere), but it doesn’t really describe how revolutionary the idea is within the context of the entire Targaryen reign.

There are occasional examples of Great House marriage included in A World of Ice and Fire, and they’re not auspicious for the stability of the realm. In the chapter on the Riverlands, we see House Blackwood, trigger an alliance-by-marriage in order to wrest control from the ruling Teague family: “Lord Roderick Blackwood sent to Storm’s End for aid. His lordship was tied to House Durrandon by marriage, as King Arlan had taken one of Lord Roderick’s daughter’s to wife….” It backfires, and the Stormlords took the Riverlands for their own, triggering years of oppression and rebellion, ended by an Ironborn invasion…which triggered even more oppression and rebellion.

The Ironborn themselves had a case where a marriage between Great Houses triggered massive instability. “The nadir of Ironborn pride and power was reached during the reigns of the three Harmunds” says World. It describes how the second of the Harmund Hoare kings, “the Haggler,” married a Lannister princess, and attempted to import mainland culture and religion, which, after his death, led to the mutilations and overthrow of his wife and son. That in turn led to a Lannister invasion, which went awry, and the book describes the result like so: “The war between the Ironborn and the Westermen continued in a desultory fashion for five more years, finally ending in an exhausted peace that left the Iron Islands impoverished, burned, and broken….It would be centuries before the Iron Islands recovered….”

These examples, combined with the War of the Five Kings, suggest that marriages between the Great Houses are inherently destabilizing. Neither A Song of Ice and Fire nor its World book suggest that there was a deliberate policy by the kings on the Iron Throne to prevent marriage alliances between their most powerful vassals. After Robert’s Rebellion, that king appeared to follow the same policy–the heir’s marriage was an alliance, but nobody else was encouraged to do so.

Hence an entire generation of the Great House’s eligible lordlings and future ladies became pawns as soon as Robert dies: from Edmure and Tyrion as the oldest, but also including Renly, Robb, Arya, Margaery, Loras, Tommen, Myrcella, Trystane, and, on the show, Robin Arryn, and in the books, Arianne, Quentyn, and Willas. (Theon is also part of this generation, although he doesn’t have his own marriage prospects). In a sense, the notable thing about Robb’s betrothal to the Freys isn’t that the alliance was made–it was that Robb hadn’t already been promised somewhere else. (Consider how perfect a political match Robb-Margaery might have been, if that kind of marriage was common in the Seven Kingdoms.)

Reading A World of Ice and Fire makes it clear: marriage alliances between Great Houses aren’t normal, but are instead both causes and effects of instability in the Seven Kingdoms. The sheer number of them occurring through the Game of Thrones storylines indicates that even without the dragons and zombies on their way, things are going to get worse in Westeros before they get better.

• Published on 11/12/2014 at 9:46 PM CDT
• Last updated on 11/12/2014 at 9:46 PM CDT