The Blackfyre Rebellions
A dying king legitimised his bastards and split his own house in two. For sixty-four years the black dragon warred against the red — five risings, two feuding half-brothers, and a company of exiles sworn to come home. Here is the whole saga, told as one.
No king ruined House Targaryen so thoroughly by dying as Aegon the Fourth, called the Unworthy, and few did more mischief on the way out. In his long, gluttonous reign he wronged half the realm; with his last breath he wronged the other half. Upon his deathbed in 184 AC he legitimised the whole gaudy litter of his bastards — his Great Bastards, born of a dozen mothers — and in doing so handed each of them a claim, and a grievance, to nurse.
Chief among them were two half-brothers who would come to hate each other as only kin can. Daemon Blackfyre was the king's son by a Targaryen cousin, a peerless knight to whom Aegon gave the ancestral Valyrian blade Blackfyre itself — a gift a wiser man might have read as a warning. Aegor Rivers, called Bittersteel, was the king's son by a Bracken, all bile and grudge. And in the shadows watched Brynden Rivers — Bloodraven — pale, sorcerous, and loyal to the trueborn king with a devotion that would prove worse than any traitor's malice.
Aegon the Unworthy left his throne to his trueborn son, Daeron the Good. He left the realm five wars.
The five risings
- The First
The Redgrass Field
196 ACTwelve years of whispers — that the bookish Daeron was no true son of Aegon but a bastard got by his own brother, that the sword Blackfyre belonged in the hand that could wield it — hardened at last into open war. Daemon raised his banners, black dragon on red, and half the realm's swords came to him. The rebellion turned on a single dreadful hour at the Redgrass Field, where Daemon and his twin sons stood surrounded.
OutcomeBloodraven and his archers of the Raven's Teeth loosed as one and cut down Daemon and both his boys where they fought. The line broke; the day, and the crown, were saved. Bittersteel led the shattered loyalists off the field and out of the realm, carrying the blade Blackfyre and an oath of vengeance across the narrow sea.
SourcesThe Sworn Sword · The World of Ice & Fire
- The Second
The Whitewalls Wedding
211 – 212 ACThe second rising died before it could properly be born. Lord Butterwell's wedding at Whitewalls was a rebel muster in disguise, gathered to crown Daemon's son and pass off a dragon's egg as an omen of restored glory. The plot wanted only a dragon, a leader of Daemon's stamp, and rather more discretion than a tourney affords.
OutcomeBloodraven, ever watchful, had eyes at the feast and iron on the road. The conspiracy unravelled amid the wine and the jousting; the would-be king Daemon II was taken without a battle worth the name. A rebellion that never fielded an army was undone by a wedding — a lesson the Targaryens would relearn, painfully, in centuries to come.
SourcesThe Mystery Knight
- The Third
Bittersteel Returns
219 ACThe exile came back. Bittersteel landed with a Blackfyre pretender and the swords of his Golden Company, determined to win with steel what whispers had failed to win. For a season the black dragon flew again over Westerosi soil, and old loyalist wounds reopened along the marches.
OutcomeThe rising was beaten and the pretender Haegon slain, treacherously, after yielding — a dishonour that gave the Blackfyre cause a fresh martyr. Bittersteel himself was taken alive this time. Rather than take his head, the crown made the crueller choice and exiled him again, and he sailed east to plot on, hatred undimmed, until his dying day.
SourcesThe World of Ice & Fire
- The Fourth
The Golden Company Lands
c. 236 ACIn the reign of Aegon the Fifth the black dragon tried its luck once more. Daemon III crossed the narrow sea with the Golden Company at his back, gambling that a realm weary of a reforming king might rise to a pretender's banner. The realm, in the main, declined.
OutcomeThe invasion was met and broken, and Daemon III fell in the fighting — by one telling to the hand of the crown prince himself. With him the direct male line of the black dragon grew perilously thin. The rising rests more on the Citadel's fuller histories than on any singer's memory, but its lesson was plain: the realm's stomach for Blackfyre kings was long since soured.
SourcesThe World of Ice & Fire · Fire & Blood
- The Fifth
The War of the Ninepenny Kings
259 – 260 ACThe last black dragon was the ugliest. Maelys the Monstrous — so named for the half-formed second head that grew from his neck, the remnant of a twin he was said to have devoured in the womb — bought his crown by murdering his own cousin, then joined a band of nine cutthroat adventurers, the Ninepenny Kings, who carved the disputed Stepstones between them and set their eyes on Westeros.
OutcomeThe realm did not wait to be invaded. The whole might of the Seven Kingdoms crossed to the Stepstones, and on those bloody rocks a young knight named Barristan Selmy cut his way to Maelys and slew him in single combat. With the Monstrous died the male line of House Blackfyre, and with it the wars that had haunted five reigns. The female line, and its schemes, sailed on beyond the maesters' certain sight.
SourcesA Song of Ice and Fire (Ser Barristan, Maester Aemon)
Bittersteel & Bloodraven: the brothers' war
Strip away the pretenders and the battles and the Blackfyre wars are, at heart, the quarrel of two half-brothers who never once met on the field. Aegor Rivers — Bittersteel — carried the black dragon's cause in his marrow. Exiled after the Redgrass Field, he founded the Golden Company out of the broken and the disinherited, and made of it an instrument sharpened across generations for a single purpose: to put a Blackfyre on the Iron Throne. Its bones, the company boasted, would come home when its work was done.
Against him stood Brynden Rivers — Bloodraven — sorcerer, spymaster, and Hand to two kings, whose thousand eyes and one saw everything the realm would rather hide. It was Bloodraven's arrows that ended the first rising and Bloodraven's whispers that smothered the second. The two were sons of the same faithless king by different mothers, and each spent his life undoing the other. Which of them served the realm and which unmade it is a question the histories still argue — and one on which the black dragon, and the red, never did agree.
See the full Blackfyre family tree →Spotlight: The Tragedy at Summerhall
The Blackfyre wars taught House Targaryen a bitter lesson: a dynasty without dragons is only a family with a very fine chair, and any bastard with a claim and a company might come for it. Some believe that lesson, and an old prophecy of a promised prince, drove Aegon the Fifth to his ruin.
In 259 AC — the very year the last Blackfyre was mustering on the Stepstones — the old king gathered his kin and his mages at Summerhall to wake dragons from stone once more, by fire and blood and sorcery long forbidden. What went wrong there the maesters cannot fully say, for few walked out to tell it. The pleasure-palace burned; the king died in the flames, and his heir with him. And amid the smoke and grief a child was born that night: Rhaegar, last dragon prince of the old line, marked from his first breath by the fire that made him. The realm buried one dynasty's fears in the same pyre that lit the next one's doom.
SourcesA Song of Ice and Fire (Ser Barristan, Maester Aemon) · The World of Ice & Fire
How many Blackfyre rebellions were there?
Five. The First (196 AC, the Redgrass Field), the Second (211–212 AC, foiled at the Whitewalls wedding), the Third (219 AC, Bittersteel's return), the Fourth (c. 236 AC, the Golden Company's landing), and the Fifth (259–260 AC, the War of the Ninepenny Kings), which ended the male line for good.
What started the Blackfyre Rebellion?
On his deathbed in 184 AC, Aegon IV — the Unworthy — legitimised all his bastards, giving each a claim against his trueborn heir, Daeron II. His son Daemon, granted the Valyrian sword Blackfyre, took it as a surname and, twelve years later, as a banner of rebellion against his half-brother the king.
Who won the Battle of the Redgrass Field?
The loyalists. At the Redgrass Field in 196 AC, Brynden Rivers — Bloodraven — and his archers, the Raven's Teeth, cut down the pretender Daemon Blackfyre and his twin sons, breaking the rebellion. Bittersteel led the survivors into exile, carrying the sword Blackfyre and an oath of vengeance across the narrow sea.
How did House Blackfyre end?
In the male line, at the War of the Ninepenny Kings (259–260 AC), when a young Ser Barristan Selmy slew Maelys the Monstrous — the last male Blackfyre — in single combat on the Stepstones. The female line, and its ambitions, sailed on beyond the maesters' certain knowledge.