The Mad King
In the annals of history, there’s no shortage of mad kings. The Book of Daniel describes the fall of the 6th century BC King Nebuchadnezzar who, heuristically believing himself superior on account of his achievements, was humbled by God by being made to go and live among the animals and feed on grass. In late 14th and early 15th Century France, there was Charles VI “the Mad’ who, as his name might suggest, was prone to sporadic outbursts of insanity, and spent a large part of his reign believing he was made of glass and could shatter at any moment.
Aerys II Targaryen, the king who started out with so much promise only to turn paranoid, unhinged, and murderous finds parallel with monarchs all across history. One of the most obvious is Ivan the Terrible of Russia. Like Aerys, Ivan also started brightly before succumbing to destructive paranoia brought on by constant court intrigues and perceived threats from those around him. By the end of his reign, he was routinely and brutally executing members of other boyar (noble) families, removing their ribs with red-hot irons, boiling, and skinning them alive.
Ivan’s cruelty may well have inspired Aerys II’s murder of Lord Rickon and Brandon Stark, who had come to negotiate the release of Lyanna Stark. Rickon, Lyanna’s father, was suspended from the rafters and roasted alive in his armor, while his son Brandon had a strangulation device attached to his neck. Brandon was told that if he could reach his father, he could use the sword placed under him to cut him down. But it was an impossible task: Brandon, in his efforts, strangled himself.
Aerys’s pyromaniac tendencies also find parallels all across history. In the first century AD there was the unhinged Emperor Nero who, we’re told, rather liked to burn things, including the vast majority of his own capital, and the Christian groups he scapegoated for doing so. Aerys’s fall from virtue and descent into murderous madness also evokes another early emperor: Caligula.
Like Aerys, Caligula was killed by those who had sworn to protect him but had witnessed (and endured) too much. For Aerys it was Jaimie Lannister, the man who should have been Tywin’s heir but who Aerys had politically vasectomized by bringing him into his knightly circle. For Caligula it was Cassius Longinus, a praetorian whose high-pitched voice and effeminate characteristics the emperor mocked so mercilessly that one day he snapped, stabbing him to death as he left the theatre.