One by one, all the remaining footholds in the green lands were lost. Nor were the lords and kings of the mainland slow to take advantage of the disunity amongst the ironborn. Over the centuries that followed, Urron Redhand and his successors had to deal with half a dozen major rebellions, and at least two major thrall uprisings. Along with the kingsmoot, Galon Whitestaff’s prohibition against the ironborn making war on other ironborn also perished amidst the slaughter on Old Wyk. “But House Greyiron’s grasp upon its iron crown did not go uncontested. Indeed, the World of Ice and Fire’s discussion of the Greyirons is remarkably brief and general, glossing over most of a millennium in a mere paragraph: The political revolution stretched down throughout the nobility: “the rulers of Great Wyk, Old Wyk, Pyke, Harlaw, and the lesser isles were reduced to lords, and several ancient lines were extinguished entirely when they refused to bend their knees.” (WOIAF) But despite this sweeping and violent reform, and the fact that the Greyiron dynasty would last a thousand years, in one of the strangest lacuna in Westerosi history that I’ve encountered to date, we know almost nothing about almost all the individual Greyiron monarchs. In an act of radical change, House Greyiron instituted a new political order by which “ the crown of the Iron Islands would be made of black iron and would pass from father to son by right of primogeniture,” abolishing both the kingsmoot and the system of subsidiary kings such that there “ would be no more salt kings, no more rock kings,” and establishing a new royal style as “ simply King of the Iron Islands” (although better known as the “Iron King”). The Glory and Grandeur of the Greyirons: Footage Not Found
What would fill the void was yet to be discovered… When we last left off with the political development of the Iron Islands, the Old Way had come crashing down thanks to the arrival of the Andals to Westeros and the ambitions of men with axes.