Mors Martell

When the Rhoynar arrived under Princess Nymeria of Ny Sar, Dorne was a dry land where petty lords and kings fought over every river and well. Most of those lords saw the newcomers as intruders with strange gods, people to be sent straight back to the sea.

Mors Martell saw it differently. In the children who had sailed from the Rhoyne and arrived as warriors hardened by years of hardship, he saw strength worth adding to his own. Legend also says he was struck by Nymeria at first sight and married her; his knights and vassal lords followed suit, taking Rhoynar women as wives or lovers.

To seal the union and assure her people they would never sail again, Nymeria burned the ships that had carried them to Dorne. By the light of those fires she proclaimed him Prince of Dorne, ruler of "the red sands and the white, and all the lands and rivers from the mountains to the great salt sea".

The title did not come without a fight: it took years of war for the Martells and their Rhoynar allies to defeat, one by one, the other Dornish kings. Mors Martell sent six of them to the Night's Watch, shackled in chains of gold.

Only his fiercest rival remained standing, King Yorick V Yronwood. The war against the Yronwoods dragged on for nine years, until Yorick himself killed Mors Martell at the Third Battle of the Boneway.