Ronnel Arryn (King)

"And the Arryn boy king yielded the Vale in return for a ride on the beast."

- Petyr Baelish

Ronnel Arryn is an unseen character in Game of Thrones. He is deceased when the events of the series begin. He was a the last King of Mountain and Vale.

He is not to be confused with his descendant Ronnel Arryn, younger brother of Jon Arryn, who lived three centuries later, and died some years before Robert's Rebellion.

Background
King Ronnel Arryn was only a child during the War of Conquest, with his mother, Queen Sharra Arryn ruling the Vale as Regent. When Visenya Targaryen flew to the Eyrie demanding submission, Ronnel bent the knee to Aegon the Conqueror and surrendered the Kingdom of the Mountain and the Vale in exchange for a ride atop Vhagar.

In the books
In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, it was Queen Sharra who surrendered the Kingdom when she found Ronnel sitting on Visenya's lap, both atop Vhagar, and he asked her if he could ride the dragon.

The Vale actually put up a fairly strong resistance during the War of Conquest. After the initial Targaryen landing at the mouth of the Blackwater River, the three siblings along with their dragons split up to pursue three separate objectives: Aegon would attack Harrenhal to the west, Rhaenys and Orys would attack Storm's End to the south. Meanwhile, Visenya would lead the Targaryen navy to make an amphibious landing in the east of the Vale - given that it would have been suicidal to try to lead a land army through the narrow pass through the Mountains of the Moon that seal its western border (a pass known as the "Bloody Gate"). However, their fleet was intercepted by the Arryn fleet, and the resulting Battle of Gulltown was the worst setback the Targaryens suffered during their invasion of Westeros (Aegon did later withdraw from Dorne, but only after guerrilla resistance convinced him it would be too difficult to hold, not a disastrous pitched battle). The entire Targaryen fleet was destroyed in the battle Visenya did what she could to salvage the situation by using her dragon Vhagar to destroy all of the remaining Arryn ships, but even so, the Targaryens no longer had a fleet to quickly reposition troops along the coasts, so the rest of their conquests had to be fought by land.

The Vale also lost its ability to move troops across the water, but rather than try to unite with the anti-Targaryen alliance before formed between the Reach and the Westerlands, Sharra adopted a siege strategy, closing the Bloody Gate and positioning her land armies to massacre the Targaryen army if it tried to force the mountain pass. The result was that the strength of the Vale was not present at the Field of Fire, though it is uncertain if this would have affected its outcome. Similar to how Aegon faced the same mentality at Harrenhal but simply flew over the castle walls, after the Field of Fire Visenya decided to simply fly her dragon over the mountains and directly to the Eyrie. Instead of immediately attacking the castle, however, the implicit threat alone was enough to make Sharra surrender.