The Greyjoy Rebellion

The ironborn declared a kingdom, lost their fleet at Fair Isle, and watched their fortress come down in a storm.

Why it came to this

Six years after Robert Baratheon took the throne, Balon Greyjoy decided he could take a crown of his own. The reasoning was not stupid on its face. The realm had just fought a long civil war; its great houses had bled; the new king was known to prefer feasting and hunting to governing; and the Iron Islands had spent the whole of the Targaryen peace being told they could no longer live the way the ironborn believe men are meant to live, which is by taking rather than by growing or trading. Balon proposed to end that, declare the islands independent, and revive the Old Way by force.

He opened the war the way the ironborn always open wars, with fire and surprise. The Iron Fleet fell on Lannisport in the night and burned the Lannister fleet at anchor ÔÇö a real blow, cleanly struck, and for a moment it looked as though the audacity might pay. But a raid is not a war. Burning an enemyÔÇÖs ships in harbour hurts him; it does not defeat him, and it does not stop the rest of a continent from mustering against you. Balon had struck the Westerlands and thereby guaranteed that Tywin Lannister, among others, would want him destroyed.

What Balon had failed to reckon with was that Robert Baratheon, whatever his faults as a king in peacetime, was a genuinely formidable war leader who became a better version of himself the moment there was a war to fight, and that the same lords who had beaten the Targaryens were all still alive and could be assembled again. The whole realm mustered against the Iron Islands, and the islands, for all their ferocity at sea, are small, poor, and few. The arithmetic was always going to catch up with the audacity.

The ground and the hosts

The war had two decisive actions and they are quite different in character. The first was at sea, off Fair Isle, where the Iron Fleet was met and destroyed. The second was on land, in the storming of Pyke itself, the Greyjoy seat.

The Iron Fleet is the one genuinely first-class instrument the ironborn possess ÔÇö longships and larger warships crewed by men who have been sailors and raiders their whole lives, in their home waters, fighting the one kind of war they are actually the best in the world at. On open water, ship for ship and man for man, the ironborn are dangerous out of all proportion to their numbers. The problem is that there are never enough of them, and the rest of the realm can build and crew more ships than the islands ever can.

Against the ironborn came the assembled power of the Seven Kingdoms: a royal fleet and the fleets of the Reach and the Westerlands, a great host of lords, and Robert Baratheon at the head of it in the element he was made for. Among the commanders was Stannis Baratheon, given command at sea, whose cold competence was about to win the warÔÇÖs decisive battle ÔÇö and, in the way of StannisÔÇÖs whole life, be somewhat overshadowed by his brotherÔÇÖs more glamorous work on land.

Fair Isle and the storming of Pyke

The Battle of Fair Isle was where the rebellion was really decided, though it is the storming of Pyke that everyone remembers. Stannis Baratheon brought the royal fleet against the Iron Fleet off Fair Isle, in the waters between the island and the mainland coast of the Westerlands, and destroyed it. The details are not richly recorded, but the outcome is unambiguous and it was catastrophic for the ironborn: the Iron Fleet, the one weapon that made independence conceivable, was broken on the water. Victarion Greyjoy commanded the ironborn ships and was beaten by a soldier who had learned the sea the way he learned everything, methodically and without joy. Once the fleet was gone, the islands could neither raid nor be defended, and the war was effectively lost ÔÇö everything after Fair Isle was the realm collecting on a debt the ironborn could no longer pay.

With the sea cleared, the royal host landed on the islands and came to Pyke, the Greyjoy stronghold ÔÇö a castle built out along a headland and on great stacks of rock standing in the sea, connected by bridges, about as forbidding a place to assault as exists in Westeros. The storming of Pyke is RobertÔÇÖs battle and it is the one the singers kept. A tower was brought down ÔÇö by a storm, by siege engines, or by both, the accounts lean on the drama rather than the engineering ÔÇö and the breach let the attackers onto the bridges. The fighting on the bridges of Pyke was close, vicious, and exactly the kind of desperate work Robert Baratheon lived for; he was in the front of it, warhammer and all, and it became one of the founding stories of his reign.

It was also where a number of reputations were made and one man in particular distinguished himself: Ser Jorah Mormont, among others, was knighted for his part in the storming, and Thoros of Myr made his name going first onto a bridge with a flaming sword. The breach was forced, the castle was taken, and Balon Greyjoy, sitting in the heart of the strongest fortress the islands possess, watched the whole realm come over his walls and had to yield.

What it cost

It cost the Iron Islands their fleet, their brief independence, and a great many of their fighting men, and it cost House Greyjoy nearly everything. BalonÔÇÖs rebellion had been built on the belief that the Old Way could be revived by force in the modern realm, and Fair Isle and Pyke were the answer: it could not, because the modern realm was simply too large and too rich to be raided into submission by a few islands.

It cost Balon his sons. Of the price the rebellion exacted from the Greyjoy family directly, the details belong in the fold below, but the shape of it is that Balon began the war with more heirs than he ended it with, and that the terms of the peace took something from him that he never stopped resenting.

It cost the ironborn, more broadly, the last serious attempt to live the Old Way for a generation. The lesson of the Greyjoy Rebellion is the same lesson the ironborn refuse to learn every time: that reaving works against the weak and the isolated, and that against a united continent it is simply a way of getting a great many ironborn killed for a fleetÔÇÖs worth of plunder.

What it changed

It confirmed Robert BaratheonÔÇÖs throne in the one way it had not yet been tested ÔÇö that the man who had won it by rebellion could hold it against rebellion, decisively and fast. A king who cannot put down a rising is not a king for long; Robert put this one down inside a single campaigning season, and it bought his reign years of quiet.

It reshaped the Iron Islands for a generation, forcing them back under the Iron ThroneÔÇÖs peace and taking a hostage to guarantee it ÔÇö a Greyjoy child raised away from the islands, in a great southern house, as surety for his fatherÔÇÖs good behaviour and as a lever if the good behaviour failed. That arrangement is one of the quiet time bombs of the whole saga, and it goes off, in its own way, years later.

And it left Balon Greyjoy alive, unrepentant, and nursing a defeat he regarded as unfinished rather than final ÔÇö which is exactly the condition in which a beaten rebel waits for the next moment of weakness in the realm that beat him. When that moment came, in the shape of a much larger war between the great houses, Balon was ready to try again, having learned from Fair Isle and Pyke almost nothing at all.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Balon Greyjoy survived his rebellion and kept his life and his seat, on the Iron ThroneÔÇÖs usual terms for a defeated great lord: submission, and a hostage. He never accepted that he had been beaten so much as interrupted, and he spent the years afterward waiting for the realm to falter again so he could reave in earnest. When it did, he crowned himself once more rather than join anyone elseÔÇÖs war ÔÇö the same mistake, made again, with the same fundamental misreading of how small the islands are against everyone else.

Two of BalonÔÇÖs three sons died in the rebellion ÔÇö Rodrik before the walls of Seagard, cut down in the fighting on the mainland, and Maron killed when the sea tower of Pyke came down in the storming. Their deaths left Balon with one living son, Theon, and it was Theon who was taken from him at the end of the war and given to Eddard Stark to raise as a ward and a hostage. A boy raised in another manÔÇÖs house, belonging fully to neither the North nor the islands, is the personal cost of the Greyjoy Rebellion, and the story spends years collecting on it.

Victarion Greyjoy, who had lost the Iron Fleet at Fair Isle, survived to command a rebuilt one and to nurse the ironbornÔÇÖs grievances into the next war and beyond it, eventually far across the world. Stannis Baratheon, who had actually won the war at sea, watched his brother take the glory of Pyke, and added it to the growing account of services rendered and thanks withheld that he kept for his entire life.