The Redgrass Field

The bloodiest battle between two Targaryen claimants before the Dance was refought in miniature.

Why it came to this

Aegon IV spent his reign making the realm worse on purpose and then, dying, legitimised every bastard he had ever fathered. It was a spiteful act with no policy behind it, and it worked exactly as spite does: it did not unseat his heir, it simply guaranteed that somebody would try. Chief among the legitimised was Daemon, a young man of extraordinary physical gifts who had been given the ancestral Valyrian steel sword of the house ÔÇö a gift with only one possible meaning, whatever the old king claimed he intended by it.

Daeron II was the opposite of his father in every way that the realm found difficult. He was scholarly, patient, unmartial, and he had done the single most useful thing any Targaryen king ever did by bringing Dorne into the realm through marriage and treaty rather than fire. That settlement was also his weakness. A great many lords of the marches and the stormlands had spent their lives fighting Dornishmen, had lost fathers and sons to them, and now watched Dornish lords at court taking offices and honours. There were also whispers, carefully tended, that Daeron was not truly his fatherÔÇÖs son at all.

So the rebellion had a candidate, a grievance, a sword and a faction, and it broke in 196. Both sides raised their strength, manoeuvred through the riverlands, and finally accepted battle on an open field, because Daemon BlackfyreÔÇÖs entire theory of himself required a field. He was a magnificent warrior with a magnificent sword and he genuinely believed that if the two hosts met and he was seen at the front of his, enough of the other side would decide the gods had spoken. It was not an absurd belief. It very nearly happened.

The ground and the hosts

The field was flat, broad and unremarkable, with one feature that mattered: a low rise along one side, wooded enough at the crest to hide men. Nothing about the ground favoured either army. Both sides had come to fight a straightforward battle of hosts, and both got one, which is precisely why it was so expensive.

The rebel host was built around Daemon himself and around a hard core of stormlanders, marcher lords and westermen with grudges. His chief lieutenant was his half-brother Aegor Rivers, called Bittersteel ÔÇö another of the old kingÔÇÖs legitimised bastards, and a man whose defining quality was that he never in his life let anything go. Where Daemon fought for the throne, Bittersteel fought against the people who had it. That difference in motive shows up later.

The loyalist host was commanded in the field by DaeronÔÇÖs second son, Prince Maekar, a hard and humourless soldier who took the position of most exposure and held it. Somewhere out of sight, still marching, was the kingÔÇÖs heir, Prince Baelor Breakspear, bringing the stormlands loyalists and the Dornish spears up on a separate line ÔÇö a deliberate arrangement, and the pivot the whole day turns on. And on the wooded rise stood a third half-brother, Brynden Rivers, called Bloodraven, with a company of archers he had raised and trained himself and who were not much liked by anyone.

Neither hostÔÇÖs numbers are recorded in any form worth repeating. They were large by the standards of the century and closely matched, and the accounts agree that both sides expected the day to be decided by weight and by Daemon.

How it was fought

It opened as a collision and stayed one for most of the day. The two lines met, ground into each other, and refused to break. This is the rarest kind of medieval battle and by far the most lethal: a field battle is usually decided in its first hour by one sideÔÇÖs nerve failing, and when neither sideÔÇÖs nerve fails, what happens instead is hours of close work in armour in the sun.

Daemon fought at the front of his centre, on foot and then mounted and then on foot again, and by every account ÔÇö including the ones written afterwards by men with a professional obligation to dislike him ÔÇö he was the best thing on the field by a distance. His portion of the line went forward. MaekarÔÇÖs van took the worst of it and was slowly driven back, and for a long stretch of the afternoon the loyalist centre was being eaten.

The moment that decided it came from the rise. Bloodraven had kept his archers out of the melee entirely, which cost him a great deal of reputation among men who thought that unchivalrous, and waited until the rebel command group was fixed in place and identifiable. Then he had them shoot ÔÇö not a general volley into the mass, but concentrated shooting at a handful of specific men in the press below. It was, by the standards of the day, an ugly way to fight and an extremely effective one. The rebel centre lost its command in the space of a few minutes.

What followed was the most dangerous half hour of the war for the loyalists, because Bittersteel did not do what a beaten commander is supposed to do. He gathered every horseman he could reach and drove them at the rise. The charge went up into the archers and through them, the two half-brothers met at the top with the whole battle burning below them, and Bloodraven came away from it having paid an eye for the ridge. For a short time it looked as though the rebellion might be rescued by pure rage.

It was not, because of the arrangement made days earlier. Baelor BreakspearÔÇÖs column came onto the field from the flank and rear while BittersteelÔÇÖs horse was committed uphill and the rebel line was already leaderless in its centre. A host caught between a line it cannot break and a fresh host it did not know was coming has no third option. The rebel army folded from the flank inward, and once folding started it did not stop.

The pursuit ran into the evening and was thorough. Bittersteel got a body of survivors clear and off the field in reasonable order, which given the circumstances is a considerable feat and one he was never given credit for by anybody who mattered. The rest scattered into the riverlands and were hunted through it for days.

What it cost

The figure the singers settled on is ten thousand dead, split roughly between the two hosts, and while that has the suspicious roundness of all such numbers it is not obviously inflated for a battle that went the whole day at close quarters. It was, up to that point, the most expensive single field in Westeros since the Dance.

The families ruined were mostly marcher and stormland houses that had backed Daemon out of hatred for the Dornish settlement, and they were ruined in the usual way: attainders, forfeitures, and sons sent to the Wall. DaeronÔÇÖs peace afterwards was noticeably milder than it could have been, which is entirely in character and which a good many loyalists thought was a mistake.

The men who were made were the two archersÔÇÖ men ÔÇö in the sense that both of DaeronÔÇÖs half-brothers walked off that field into the roles they would occupy for the rest of their lives. Bloodraven had won the battle by a method nobody wanted to praise, and got power, an eyeÔÇÖs worth of scar tissue, and a reputation as the kind of man you do not turn your back on. Bittersteel had lost it and got the certainty that the thing was unfinished.

What it changed

It kept the throne with DaeronÔÇÖs line and it settled, for the time being, that the Dornish settlement would hold. That is the concrete result, and it is not small: every later Targaryen king down to the end of the dynasty sits where he sits because of that afternoon.

What it did not do was end anything. The rebellion had been built on a real grievance held by real houses, and beating an army does not unmake a grievance. The Blackfyre claim survived the field, went into exile across the narrow sea, and came back at intervals for the better part of a century, each time thinner and each time expensive.

The deeper change was in how the realm thought about legitimacy. Before the Redgrass Field, a bastard with a sword and a following was a rumour. Afterwards he was a category. Every Targaryen king for four generations governs with one eye on the far shore, and a good deal of the crownÔÇÖs foreign policy in the century that follows makes no sense at all unless you remember this field.

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

Daemon Blackfyre was shot down in the press by BloodravenÔÇÖs archers along with his twin sons Aegon and Aemon, who had been fighting beside him. The three of them went in the same volley. His champion Quentyn Ball, called Fireball, had already been killed in a chance encounter the day before the battle and never reached the field at all ÔÇö a small accident that arguably cost the rebellion as much as anything that happened on the day.

Aegor Rivers, Bittersteel, escaped the field and took ship for the Free Cities with several of DaemonÔÇÖs surviving sons. There he founded the Golden Company out of the wreckage of the rebellion, an exile army with a standing promise to come home, and he spent the remainder of his life engineering further attempts. Neither he nor Brynden Rivers ever stopped fighting the other; both outlived the reign the battle preserved.

Prince Baelor Breakspear, whose flank march won the day and who was by common consent the best king Westeros never got, died a few years later of a blow taken in a tourney melee. The succession that the Redgrass Field secured passed instead down MaekarÔÇÖs line, with consequences that took two more generations to arrive.