Baela's Peace

Baela's Peace refers to the acts by Queen Baela I Targaryen, who would later come to be known as "the Good" which saw a series of marriages come to be between the great families of the Westerlands and the Iron Islands in order to bring their hostilities to an end.

Baela's Peace
For the better part of a decade, the Westerlands had known peace. Ironborn longships had withdrawn to their Isles, to their watery abodes and their damp keeps, but in 159 AC, the West came to know violence once more.

A new generation of Ironborn had crawled forth from the crib, from the holds and towers of the Iron Islands, and had grown into men, green men, men without scars from raids or finger dances, but men all the same, even if they were of a greener sort. And so, that year, in 159 AC, a series of disorganised and violent attacks struck up and down the coast of the Westerlands. The first place they struck stood beneath the banner of the red lion, the Reynes, catching a series of villages by surprise, but after that, that early raid, the raids turned bloody on both sides as the coastal Houses fortified themselves as best they could and worked to protect their lands. Lannisport and the Rock were never touched, they held a strength the rest lacked.

But, that next year, in a fateful turn of events, one that would come to mark a generation of births, the young Queen, Baela I Targaryen, threw off her regents, and was crowned the rightful ruler of these Seven Kingdoms. That same year, Baela, in what would become a theme of her rule, rode west, and from the great seat of Castamere, the first place to have seen these renewed raids, declared there would be a peace, a peace in perpetuity. This peace, the Queen declared, would be sealed by the exchange of blood, a series of marriages. Lord Reyne was wed to a Drumm, while a Banefort lady was sent to wed Lord Harlaw, and a Brax lady to an Orkwood, while even the wastrel Lord of the Rock, the son of Johanna Lannister, was wed to a Botley of Lordsport. These were but a few of the marriages the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms arranged between these two feuding kingdoms of old.

It was this peace, these marriages, that would bring a peace and an increase in trade between the Westerlands and the Iron Islands for nigh on twenty years, save a small number of rogue raids, and ones that were fast persecuted by the executioner's noose.