House Baratheon
The Baratheons are the youngest of the great houses, founded during Aegon's Conquest when Orys Baratheon — rumored to be the Conqueror's bastard half-brother — slew the last Storm King and took his daughter, his castle, and his sigil for his own. Their arms are a crowned black stag on gold; their words, fittingly for a house of tempers, are Ours is the Fury. Under Robert the stag was crowned in earnest, and for the first time a Baratheon sat the Iron Throne.
The middle brother: iron-hard, joyless, and utterly just. He held Storm's End through a year of starvation for Robert's cause and was rewarded with the bleak rock of Dragonstone. Robert never loved him, Stannis never forgot it, and their cold rivalry outlived the king himself.
The youngest brother: charming, beautiful, and Robert without the war record — a resemblance many remarked on and Stannis resented. He sat Robert's small council as master of laws and, when the king lay dying, made his own bid for the succession.
Robert's parents, Lord Steffon Baratheon and Lady Cassana Estermont, drowned in Shipbreaker Bay returning from a mission for King Aerys — with the storm's irony, within sight of home. Their deaths made Robert a lord before he was ready to be one.
The Marriage That Broke a Realm
Cersei Lannister came to the marriage a queen in her own mind already, beautiful and razor-sharp, and briefly hopeful. Robert killed that hope on their wedding night by whispering Lyanna's name, and the union rotted from there into public contempt and private cruelty on both sides. Cersei's revenge was absolute: not one of the three royal children was Robert's. Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen were all fathered by her twin, Ser Jaime Lannister — the secret that killed Jon Arryn, killed Ned Stark, and ultimately shattered the realm.
Robert's actual descendants were his bastards, scattered and mostly unacknowledged — among them Mya Stone in the Vale, whom he had genuinely loved as an infant, Edric Storm, his one acknowledged bastard, raised at Storm's End, and Gendry, an armorer's apprentice in King's Landing with his father's blue eyes, black hair, and stubborn strength, who never knew whose son he was.
He loved a memory and married an alliance.
The whole tragedy of Robert's marriage
The Bonds That Held
Foster brother, best friend, conscience. Ned was the only man alive who told Robert the truth and the only one Robert trusted with his realm. Their friendship survived a war, a butchered royal family, and fourteen years of distance — and broke, at the last, over the plot to poison a Targaryen girl across the sea.
The lord who raised Robert, refused to surrender him to the Mad King, and started the rebellion for his sake. As Hand of the King, Arryn quietly ran the Seven Kingdoms for fourteen years while Robert hunted and feasted. His sudden death is where the entire saga begins.
The betrothed Robert lost and the ghost he never stopped loving — or never stopped loving his idea of. Her disappearance with Rhaegar sparked the war; her death at its end hollowed out the victory. Robert visited her tomb before almost anything else at Winterfell.
The legendary Kingsguard knight who fought against Robert at the Trident. Robert, characteristically, sent his own maester to save the wounded Selmy's life and then named him Lord Commander of his Kingsguard — grudges were for Targaryens only.
The Court He Ignored
Robert's small council was, in hindsight, a slow coup he never bothered to notice: the queen's family filling the offices, Petyr Baelish conjuring loans as master of coin while the Crown sank six million dragons into debt, Varys whispering only what was useful, and Robert waving it all away as long as the wine kept coming. He knew, and said openly, that counting coppers bored him and that being king was misery. The realm's tragedy is that he was honest about it and changed nothing.
| Hand of the King | Jon Arryn (fourteen years), then Eddard Stark (a matter of months) |
|---|---|
| Master of Coin | Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish — the debt's architect and beneficiary |
| Master of Whisperers | Varys, the Spider — serving interests entirely his own |
| Master of Laws | Renly Baratheon, the king's youngest brother |
| Master of Ships | Stannis Baratheon — until he abandoned court, sensing what was coming |
| Lord Commander, Kingsguard | Ser Barristan Selmy, the finest knight of his age, guarding a king who no longer needed guarding from anything but himself |