When the Fourteen Flames erupted and the Doom fell upon Valyria in the year 114 before the Conquest, the greatest power the world had ever known was undone in a single day, and the lands that had bowed before the dragonlords were left masterless. The hundred years that followed the maesters name the Century of Blood, for the daughters of Valyria fell at once to warring over the shattered inheritance of their mother, and no peace held anywhere from the Summer Sea to the Shivering Sea.
Volantis, eldest and proudest of the Free Cities, sought to reforge the Freehold by the sword under the rule of her Tigers, and for a time she carried all before her, taking Lys and threatening Myr and Tyrosh. Yet her ambition roused the other cities against her, and when Pentos and Tyrosh made common cause and the young men of Lys and Myr rose in revolt, the tide turned. It is written that the sellsails of Braavos and even the dragon of Aegon Targaryen, flown from Dragonstone, lent their weight against the Tiger fleets, and Volantis was thrown back and never again came so near to empire. In the same bloody span the horselords of the Dothraki Sea, once a scattering of petty khalasars, swelled into a scourge that overran the ancient realm of Sarnor, sacked Qohor and the cities of the Rhoyne, and made themselves the terror of the eastern lands. By the time the killing slackened, the Kingdom of Sarnor lay in ruins, the balance of the Free Cities had settled into the wary shape it holds today, and the world beyond the narrow sea had been remade in blood.