Targaryen Family Tree

It is the line of descent of House Targaryen, the Valyrian dragonlords who ruled the Seven Kingdoms from 1 AC to 283 AC. The full tree runs 21 generations and 179 people, beginning with Aenar the Exile, who left Valyria before the Doom, and ending with Daenerys, Jon Snow and the children of Robert’s Rebellion. The interactive chart on this page shows all of them at once, with every marriage, every disputed parentage and every one of the seventeen crowned kings marked.

Read it top to bottom: each row is one generation, solid lines run from parents to children, and horizontal connectors are marriages. What makes it unusual is that it is not shaped like a normal tree. The Targaryens married brother to sister, uncle to niece and cousin to cousin for three centuries, so branches rejoin instead of only spreading apart, and the same person can appear in two places in your eye. This chart draws those marriages in red and shades them by how closely the couple were related, so the pattern is visible rather than hidden.

Yes. Jon Snow is the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, raised as Eddard Stark’s bastard to hide him from Robert Baratheon. The television series confirms it and gives his birth name as Aegon Targaryen. In the books his mother is still never named.

Daenerys is Jon’s aunt. Her eldest brother Rhaegar was Jon’s father, which makes Jon her nephew. Because Rhaegar was born in 259 AC and Daenerys in 284 AC, Jon is a year older than the aunt he fell in love with.

On the last generation of the chart, at the very bottom, joined to Rhaegar Targaryen by a dashed line. He sits beside Rhaegar’s children by Elia Martell, Rhaenys and Aegon, who were his half-sister and half-brother. The line is dashed because the television series states the parentage outright while the novels have still never named his mother, and this chart marks disputed parentage rather than presenting it as settled.

Aegon I Targaryen, called Aegon the Conqueror. He was crowned at Oldtown in 1 AC after taking six of the seven kingdoms with his sisters Visenya and Rhaenys and their three dragons. The Westerosi calendar counts from that coronation.

Aerys II Targaryen, the Mad King, who ruled from 262 to 283 AC. He was killed by Ser Jaime Lannister of his own Kingsguard during the Sack of King’s Landing, ending 283 years of Targaryen rule on the Iron Throne.

Seventeen crowned kings, from Aegon I to Aerys II. The maesters of the Citadel do not count Rhaenyra among them, although she held King’s Landing for about six months in 130 AC and is usually styled Rhaenyra I by everyone else.

Five Targaryens ruled as King Aegon, numbered I to V. Counting the ones who never sat the throne, including Aegon the Uncrowned, Rhaegar’s infant son, and Jon Snow under his birth name, at least nine Targaryens carried the name.

They were Valyrian dragonlords, and in Valyria dragonlord families wed brother to sister to keep the bloodline pure and preserve their bond with dragons. The Faith of the Seven called it abomination until Jaehaerys I negotiated the Doctrine of Exceptionalism.

The Blacks backed Rhaenyra Targaryen, her uncle-husband Daemon and House Velaryon. The Greens backed her half-brother Aegon II, his mother Alicent Hightower and her father Otto. Both claimants died and Rhaenyra’s son Aegon III took the throne.

Legally they were Laenor Velaryon’s. Almost every source in Fire and Blood points to Ser Harwin Strong: Jacaerys, Lucerys and Joffrey were brown haired and brown eyed, while both Rhaenyra and Laenor were silver haired and purple eyed.

Daenerys descends from Rhaenyra through her second son Viserys II, roughly eight generations back. The Blacks lost the Dance of the Dragons but won the bloodline: every Targaryen king after 131 AC descends from Rhaenyra and Daemon, not from Aegon II.

Daenerys was the youngest child of Aerys II, the Mad King, and his sister-wife Rhaella, born on Dragonstone in 284 AC during the storm that gave her the name Stormborn. Her brothers were Rhaegar, killed at the Trident, and Viserys. Her line runs back without a break through fourteen generations of kings to Aegon the Conqueror, by way of Aegon V, Maekar I, Daeron II and Viserys II. She married Khal Drogo and later Hizdahr zo Loraq, and her only child, Rhaego, was stillborn.

Rhaenyra was the only child of Viserys I and Aemma Arryn, and his named heir. She married Laenor Velaryon and had Jacaerys, Lucerys and Joffrey, whose parentage the sources dispute, then married her uncle Daemon Targaryen and had Aegon III, Viserys II and a stillborn daughter, Visenya. Her half-brothers by Alicent Hightower, Aegon II, Helaena, Aemond and Daeron, made up the Green faction that fought her. She lost the war and died in 130 AC, but every Targaryen king afterwards descends from her through Viserys II.

Through Jon Snow, yes. Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark joined the two houses in 283 AC. Before that they were rivals, not kin: Torrhen Stark knelt to Aegon the Conqueror in 1 AC rather than fight him.

His grandmother was Rhaelle Targaryen, daughter of Aegon V. That Targaryen blood is what let Robert claim the Iron Throne by descent rather than purely by conquest after Robert’s Rebellion.

No. House Velaryon is a separate Valyrian house that came to Westeros before the Targaryens. They intermarried so often, from Valaena to Alyssa to Rhaenys to Daenaera, that the two family trees are effectively braided together.

By blood, yes. House Blackfyre began with Daemon Blackfyre, a legitimised bastard son of Aegon IV, who took the family sword and reversed the family colours. Five rebellions later the male line ended in 260 AC.

Egg is Aegon V Targaryen, fourth son of Maekar I, who travelled Westeros as squire to the hedge knight Ser Duncan the Tall. A run of deaths in his family eventually made him king in 233 AC.

Aerys II Targaryen. He began his reign well and ended it burning Lord Rickard Stark alive in the throne room and stockpiling wildfire beneath King’s Landing. His cruelty triggered Robert’s Rebellion.

Aegon I rode Balerion, Visenya rode Vhagar and Rhaenys rode Meraxes. Later, Rhaenyra rode Syrax, Daemon rode Caraxes, Aemond rode Vhagar, Aegon II rode Sunfyre, and Daenerys rode Drogon.

Very few of them died quietly. The chart records a cause of death for everyone the sources give one to, and you can read it in the panel that opens when you click a name. Dragons killed a great many, including Rhaenyra, eaten by her half-brother’s mount, and Aerea, who came back from Valyria with something worse. Kinslaying killed more: Aegon II was poisoned by his own men, Aemond and Daemon fell together over the Gods Eye, and Aerys II was cut down by his own Kingsguard. Others went to childbed, to the Great Spring Sickness, to a lamprey pie in Rhaegel’s case, and to the fire at Summerhall that took Aegon V and his heir at once. Fifteen infants never got a cause at all.

Twenty one generations are charted here, from Aenar the Exile, who brought the family out of Valyria in 114 BC, through to Jon Snow, Daenerys and the children of Robert’s Rebellion. That covers roughly four hundred years.

At the end of the television series, Daenerys is dead and Jon Snow is the last known Targaryen by blood, though he lives under the Stark name beyond the Wall. In the books a claimant calling himself Aegon, Rhaegar’s son, has landed in Westeros.

Egg is Aegon Targaryen, the fourth son of Maekar I, and he falls in the fifth generation below Daeron II, near the middle of the full chart. Search "Egg" or "Aegon V" and the chart will centre on him. His father Maekar sits directly above; his brothers Daeron the Drunken, Aerion Brightflame and Maester Aemon sit beside him; his wife Betha Blackwood and their children Duncan, Jaehaerys II, Shaera, Daeron and Rhaelle sit below. He fits into the succession as the least likely person in it, a fourth son of a fourth son who squired for the hedge knight Ser Duncan the Tall with his head shaved to hide the silver hair, and who reached the throne in 233 AC only because plague, a refusal and two abdications cleared everyone ahead of him. Daenerys is his great-granddaughter, and Robert Baratheon his great-grandson through his daughter Rhaelle.

Yes. The whole Dunk and Egg generation is charted: Maekar I and his sons Daeron the Drunken, Aerion Brightflame, Maester Aemon and Egg himself, plus their uncle Baelor Breakspear and the Blackfyre pretenders they kept fighting. There is a dedicated chart for that era as well as the full tree.

He is her great-great-uncle. Aemon was the second son of Maekar I and the older brother of Aegon V, who was Daenerys’s great-grandfather. He was offered the Iron Throne before Egg and refused it, taking the black instead so he could never be used against his brother.

The eldest son of Daeron II and Prince of Dragonstone, widely thought the best king Westeros never got. He died in 209 AC of a blow taken in the Trial of Seven at Ashford, defending Ser Duncan the Tall, which moved the succession sideways to his brother Maekar and eventually to Egg.

Maekar I’s second surviving son and Egg’s cruel older brother, remembered for the Trial of Seven at Ashford and for dying in 232 AC after drinking wildfire, convinced it would turn him into a dragon. His death is one of the reasons the crown reached Aegon V at all.

House of the Dragon begins about 172 years before Game of Thrones. Rhaenyra Targaryen is roughly Daenerys’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, through Rhaenyra’s son Viserys II.