Aerys II Targaryen

Aerys was born in 244 AC, the only son of Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen and his sister-wife, Princess Shaera; he had a single sister, Rhaella. A woods witch who was friends with Lady Jenny of Oldstones convinced Jaehaerys to marry his teenage children to one another, a decision the old king Aegon V accepted with obvious reluctance. Ser Barristan Selmy would later say that on their wedding day there was no affection at all between Aerys and Rhaella.

In 259 AC Rhaella gave birth to her first child, Rhaegar, on the same day Summerhall burned and King Aegon V, Prince Duncan, and the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard all died. The crown passed to Jaehaerys, Aerys's father. Still a squire, Aerys fought at the Stepstones during the War of the Ninepenny Kings, and at sixteen chose his friend Tywin Lannister to knight him. Three years later, when Jaehaerys II died, Aerys inherited the throne.

Aerys's reign opened with energy in 262 AC. He refreshed the court and made Tywin Lannister his Hand, impressed by how the young lord had brought Casterly Rock's rebel houses to heel. For more than a decade the realm was at peace, still recovering from the tragedy of Summerhall.

Over the years Aerys grew convinced that it was Tywin, not himself, who truly ruled — a rumor that cost Ser Ilyn Payne, captain of his Hand's guard, his tongue. Jealous and somewhat afraid of his own councillor, the king decided to take matters into his own hands. At the tourney Tywin held at Lannisport in 276 AC in his honor, Aerys flatly refused his Hand's proposed match between Cersei Lannister and Prince Rhaegar, saying a king does not wed his heir to a servant's daughter. Soon after he married Rhaegar to the Dornish princess Elia Martell instead, a match Tywin took as a personal insult.

In late 276 AC, Lord Denys Darklyn, pushed by his Myrish wife, withheld the crown's harbor taxes. Aerys wanted to settle it in person and rode to Duskendale with only a small escort; a panicked Lord Denys took him prisoner instead. The king spent six months in captivity while Tywin Lannister raised an army and laid siege to the town. It was Ser Barristan Selmy who finally brought him out alive.

Aerys came back from captivity determined to wipe out every branch of House Darklyn, torturing its members slowly before burning them alive. Many point to that episode as the moment his madness took hold. He stopped trusting his son, his wife, and his own Hand, and for years barely left the Red Keep. He surrounded himself with new sources of information instead — among them the eunuch Varys, whom he made his Master of Whisperers — and an ever more unhealthy fascination with wildfire grew in him.

After years shut inside the Red Keep, Aerys reappeared in public in 281 AC to attend the great tourney at Harrenhal. He went because Varys had warned him that his son Rhaegar meant to use the gathering of lords to plot against him; to this day no one knows for certain whether that rumor was true.

A year after the tourney, in 282 AC, Prince Rhaegar vanished south with Lyanna Stark. Her older brother Brandon rode to King's Landing with a group of friends, sons of prominent northern lords, to demand Rhaegar answer for it.

Rhaegar was not in the city, but Aerys was, and he had Brandon and his companions arrested for plotting his son's murder. When their fathers came to court to plead for them, the king had them all executed: Rickard Stark he burned alive with wildfire while his son Brandon, strapped into a device that strangled him the harder he struggled, was made to watch. Aerys showed no sign of condemning Lyanna's abduction either. That act lit the fuse that led to war.

The execution of the Starks ignited Robert's Rebellion. Aerys's first wartime Hand, Lord Owen Merryweather, failed to contain the earliest uprisings and was replaced by Jon Connington, a close friend of Rhaegar's; Connington was defeated at Stoney Sept, in the Battle of the Bells, and the king replaced him in turn with Lord Qarlton Chelsted.

After the loyalist defeat at the Bells, Aerys, terrified of losing the city, ordered his pyromancers to brew vast stores of wildfire and hide it throughout King's Landing, ready to burn the capital rather than surrender it. When Chelsted discovered the plan and failed to talk him out of it, he resigned as Hand; Aerys had him burned alive for it and replaced him with Lord Rossart, head of the Alchemists' Guild.

The royalist army was crushed at the Battle of the Trident, where Prince Rhaegar died. Aerys then sent his pregnant wife Rhaella and young Prince Viserys to Dragonstone, while he stayed in the Red Keep holding Princess Elia Martell and her children hostage to keep Dorne loyal to the throne.

Hours before the main rebel army, led by Eddard Stark, could reach the capital, twelve thousand Westermen under Tywin Lannister appeared at the gates of King's Landing. Varys urged Aerys to be wary, but the king listened instead to Grand Maester Pycelle, who assured him Tywin had come to swear loyalty. He opened the gates, and the Lannister troops sacked the city.

Knowing all was lost, Aerys ordered his pyromancers to light the wildfire hidden beneath King's Landing. Jaime Lannister would later say the king, in his madness, believed the flames would not kill him but turn him into a dragon that could lay waste to his enemies. Jaime killed the pyromancers before the order could be carried out, broke the vow that bound him to the Kingsguard, and cut Aerys down at the foot of the Iron Throne. In doing so he kept anyone else from lighting the fire that would have burned the whole city alive.