The First Blackfyre Rebellion sprang from the deathbed largesse of King Aegon IV, called the Unworthy, who upon his death in 184 AC legitimized all his bastards born of noble women. Chief among them was Daemon, a great bastard got upon a cousin of the king, to whom Aegon had gifted the ancestral Valyrian sword of House Targaryen, Blackfyre. Daemon took the sword for his house name and, some twelve years after, his half brother's crown for his ambition. Whispers in the realm held that Daemon had the truer claim, being manlike and martial where King Daeron II was bookish and mild; and to that grievance were added the resentments of lords who liked neither Daeron's Dornish queen nor the peace that had brought Dorne into the realm.
In 196 AC Daemon rose in open revolt, and a great part of the realm declared for the black dragon. His half brother Aegor Rivers, called Bittersteel, stood at his right hand, and the fierce knight Ser Quentyn Ball, whom men named Fireball, won him victories in the early days of the war and very nearly took King's Landing before he fell. Against them the loyalist cause was held by Daeron's heir, Prince Baelor Breakspear, and by another of the great bastards, Brynden Rivers, called Bloodraven, who commanded the king's archers. An early clash at the Honeywine checked the rebel advance in the Reach, and the two hosts came together at last upon a broad field of grass east of King's Landing.
The Battle of the Redgrass Field was the bloodiest day of fighting the Seven Kingdoms had seen since the Dance of the Dragons. From a rise called Weeping Ridge, Bloodraven and his marksmen, the Raven's Teeth, loosed their arrows upon Daemon Blackfyre where he fought in the press below, and there the pretender fell together with his twin sons Aegon and Aemon. Bittersteel led a desperate charge that scattered Bloodraven's archers and cost the sorcerer an eye, but the arrival of Prince Baelor with the men of the stormlands and Dorne closed upon the rebels like a hammer upon an anvil and broke them utterly. Daemon lay dead upon the grass, and the day was lost; yet Bittersteel bore the sword Blackfyre and the surviving sons of the black dragon across the narrow sea into exile, where he founded the sellsword brotherhood called the Golden Company, and so kept the Blackfyre cause alive to trouble the realm for three generations more.