By the middle of the third century after the Conquest, the exiles and outlaws of the Free Cities had grown into a menace the Iron Throne could no longer ignore. Nine adventurers, sellsword captains and pirate princes and would be kings, met beneath the Bleeding Tower of Tyrosh and swore to aid one another in their conquests, an alliance the singers named the Band of Nine. Foremost among them was Maelys Blackfyre, called Maelys the Monstrous, last of the male line of the black dragon, a man so strong and cruel that he had won the captaincy of the Golden Company by twisting the head from the shoulders of his own cousin. Maelys claimed the Iron Throne as his birthright, and the Stepstones as the stepping stones by which to reach it.
In 259 AC the Band of Nine seized the Stepstones and the Disputed Lands, and King Jaehaerys II answered by sending the whole strength of the realm against them. Lord Ormund Baratheon, Hand of the King, led the host across the narrow sea, and with him rode the great lords and their sons and near every knight of note in Westeros. The fighting was hard and the Stepstones ran red, and Lord Ormund fell in the thick of it, cut down by the hand of Maelys himself.
The war was decided when a young knight of the Kingsguard, Ser Barristan Selmy, then barely come into his manhood, cut his way through the rebel host to face Maelys the Monstrous in single combat and slew him. With Maelys dead the Band of Nine came apart, and the surviving captains fell to squabbling among themselves. Reckoned by the maesters the fifth and last of the Blackfyre Rebellions, the War of the Ninepenny Kings ended the male line of the pretenders forever, and made the name of Barristan the Bold known throughout the Seven Kingdoms.