Dagon Greyjoy

When Aerys I took the crown, oversight of the Iron Islands slackened as never before. The king's own bastard uncle, Bloodraven, Hand and master of whisperers, had his eyes fixed on Tyrosh, where Bittersteel was rallying the Blackfyre loyalists.

Dagon read that distraction as an opening and turned his men loose on the coasts of the Sunset Sea.

Around 211 AC, Dagon's ships worked their way down the western coastline, leaving fire behind them. They reached as far south as the Rejo, sacking Little Dosk and carrying off much of the island's wealth along with a hundred captured women.

Meanwhile Lord Beron Stark was gathering swords in the north to bring him down, while House Lannister launched ships to shut him out at sea. A band of ironborn tried to board the White Lady on her crossing from Dorne to Oldtown, unaware that Duncan and Egg were aboard; the attack came to nothing.

Every time loyalist forces closed in on him, Dagon fell back to the islands, a habit that led contemporaries such as Maynard Plumm to warn that he could only be beaten on the water, never on land. In time it was House Targaryen that brought him down.

In the Iron Islands, Dagon's fame came to overshadow that of his ancestor Dalton Greyjoy, the Red Kraken. Generations later his descendant Victarion Greyjoy still remembered him as the man who "beat the lion in its den and tied the wolf's tail in knots, but he couldn't beat the dragon".

After his time, no ironborn raided the Reach again until 300 AC, when another of his descendants took up the old habit. A ship of the Iron Fleet still carries his name in his memory.