The Origins Of The Imperium Of Man
Unveiling the Genesis: The Birth of the Imperium
“The Emperor Protects!”. This formal greetings you can hear on any corner of the most young and overpopulated interstellar empire – the Imperium of Man, or just the Imperium. This civilization causes conflicting feelings among other races. On the one hand, they fear and despise the fuss of the young race, which not so long ago began to explore the vastness of the universe. But on another, it is worth noting due respect for the achievements of man and such rapid development after the Age of Strife.
Actually mankind has always strived for the stars. In the late 2nd Millennium once have been developed the necessary technology to leave the Earth’s orbit Mars became the first planet to be colonized and terraformed. Then the entire Sol System was ultimately colonized.
In 15th Millennium advanced nuclear fusion and anti-matter propulsion technology was developed that eventually allowed humanity begin to bring under the stars using sub-light spacecraft.
The start of the Age of Technology was marked around the 18th Millennium. The development of the Warp-Drive and the Gellar Field allowed spacecraft to make short jumps through the recently discovered extradimensional realm known as the Immaterium, or the Warp, traveling vast interstellar distances in a relatively short amount of time.
The Warp-Drive’s development greatly accelerated the colonization of the Milky Way Galaxy, and for the first time allowed interstellar trade and communications between the far-flung extrasolar colonies and the homeworld of mankind, Terra. Also, during this time, the first sentient alien races were encountered by explorers and colonists.
As a consequence the psychic Navigator Gene was created and the resulting birth of the mutant navigators, mildly psychic humans with a “third eye” of extrasensory perception who could see into the maddening currents of the Warp and navigate a course through them for faster-than-light starships. This allowed spacecraft to make longer and more accurate Warp jumps than previously possible when relying wholly upon a computer for navigation in the chaotic realm of the Immaterium.
It was during the Age of Technology that psykers were first scientifically verified to exist towards the end of the 22nd Millennium. Where at first the gift of the psychic mutation was limited to only a few individuals in every human population (who often fell victim to superstitious suppression), towards the end of the Age of Technology, psykers suddenly began appearing in unusually great numbers, on every human world.
Of major importance to the era was the invention of the Standard Template Construct (STC) database system. The STCs contained all human scientific and technological knowledge of the era and provided the instructions required to build anything the colonists might need. These highly advanced computer databases allowed human colonies to maintain an advanced technological level. Perfection of the Standard Template Construct (STC) system permitted an explosion of colonization that reached the furthest limits of the galaxy.
One of the reasons humanity was so successful at conquering a large part of the galaxy during this era was the development of the artificially intelligent humanoid constructs known as the Men of Iron and the Men of Stone. These powerful and fully autonomous intelligent robots intended for both labor and combat won many wars for Humanity.
But for some unknown reason turned against their masters at the end of the Age of Technology some time in the late 23rd Millennium and unleashed a terrible war upon the human worlds. During this ancient conflict, remembered only as the “Cybernetic Revolt,” both sides unleashed fearsome weapons of advanced technology. The Cybernetic Revolt was eventually won by an alliance of galactic powers, some of whom may not have been human, but at a terrible cost. The damage to interstellar society was catastrophic and shattered much of hard-won economic strength and political unity, and lay the foundation for the later collapse caused by the onset of the Age of Strife.
It is as a result of this ancient war that it is now considered one of the greatest crimes in Imperial space to develop an artificially intelligent thinking machine, an “Abominable Intelligence” or Silica Animus. The widespread fear and revulsion towards artificial general intelligence amongst the worlds of mankind in the wake of the terrible conflict with the Men of Iron led to the development of the first servitors at the end of this period. Servitors were cybernetic servants lacking true sentience created from the bodies of condemned criminals or lobotomized, vat-grown humanoids whose bodies and brains were partially replaced with machine systems. They served a as a replacement for the labor force once provided by the Men of Iron.
In the 25th Millennium Warp travel became increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible due to the great Warp Storms that convulsed the Immaterium and would herald the violent birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh and the later Fall of the Aeldari. The sudden impossibility of Warp travel meant that the once-unified interstellar civilization broke apart into completely isolated star systems and worlds. Daemonic possession, widespread insanity among the psyker population and the increasing interstellar isolation led to inter-Human conflict, utter anarchy and the regression of most Human civilizations into forms of barbarism.
The Age of Technology is being replaced by the Age of Strife, also sometimes referred to as “Old Night”. The apocalyptic and highly-fragmented period of human history that began roughly in the 25th Millennium and ended in the 30th Millennium with the birth of the Imperium of Man. It was in this time that the great human interstellar civilization collapsed into isolation, constant warfare, disease, rampant mutation, famine and a host of other terrible tragedies. These events killed tens of billions of people and pushed humanity to the brink of extinction. In a relatively short span of time, the once galaxy-spanning human civilization was brought to its knees, and was forced to endure nearly five millennia of anarchy, terror, tyranny, war, genocide and slavery. Other than tales of great suffering, little information has survived this dark time to be known to citizens of the Imperium.
The settled worlds of the Sol System were surrounded by terrible Warp storms at the start of the Age of Strife, isolating the human homeworld for several thousand standard years from the rest of the galaxy. Control of the Sol System shifted constantly between the worlds of Terra and Mars during the first half of the Age of Strife. By the 28th Millennium almost all traces of advanced technical civilization on Terra were long gone; instead, techno-barbarians battled one another over the scraps of the ancient human interstellar society that remained on the world.
Eventually, amidst the ruins of human civilization, an immensely powerful leader and psyker known only as the Emperor of Mankind divined that the final birth of the new Chaos God Slaanesh was nearing, as well as the effect this birth would have on the turmoil afflicting the galaxy. He began to accelerate his preparations for this history-changing event.
From the beginning of the Age of Strife the Emperor had no longer been content with guiding humanity from the shadows under a myriad of different historical identities. The Emperor had come to believe that if his species was to survive, he would have to take charge himself of humankind’s destiny, openly and without subterfuge.
Within his underground gene-labs beneath the Himalazian Mountains the Emperor began to experiment on the human genetic code. Through deeds of great valor and his own personal charisma, the Emperor recruited from the techno-barbarians that wandered Terra’s surface and genetically altered them, turning them into the Thunder Warriors and the other early transhuman supersoldiers who comprised the first units of the Imperial Army and would serve as the prototypes for the later development of the Space Marines, the Emperor began His conquest of Terra with the intent to reunite the warring techno-barbarian nations into a unified planetary government.
Once the Emperor had gathered sufficient military forces, he began The Unification Wars – a series of conflicts fought on Terra beginning in the 29th Millennium at the end of the Age of Strife. The armies of the Emperor swept all before them like wheat before the harvester’s scythe until all the techno-barbarian warlords had either been conquered outright or had agreed through diplomacy to become subservient to the Emperor’s will.
The Emperor accepted the deaths of the many innocents that resulted from the conquest of Terra with great remorse in order to achieve the greater good of unifying Humanity and protecting it from the manifest predations of the Warp and predatory xenos of the galaxy.
The war continued without relent until finally all of Old Earth’s techno-barbarian factions, nations and fractured city-states pledged the Emperor fealty and at last Terra was unified for the first time in many millennia.
Rise of a Galactic Power: The Great Crusade
Once the Unification Wars were completed, the Emperor forged a new unified planetary government under His leadership. He next journeyed to Mars and met with the tech-adepts of the Cult Mechanicus which would later be called the Adeptus Mechanicus.
In return for the use of the ancient Mechanicum’s vast manufactoria, the deployment of its Titan Legions, Knights, Skitarii Legions and the use of its orbital shipyards to construct the weaponry and starships He would need for the Great Crusade, the Emperor agreed to grant the Mechanicum complete political autonomy on Mars and its other Forge Worlds as well as an exemption to the atheism required by the Imperial Truth.
This agreement, known as the Treaty of Mars (the Treaty of Olympus to the Mechanicum), marks the true foundation of the Imperium of Man in the alliance between Terra and Mars.
The Emperor of Mankind sought to unite all of humanity under one banner following the Long Night of the Age of Strife, and end inter-human conflict. Once united, the Emperor intended to begin the next stage of His great plan to ensure human domination of the Milky Way Galaxy, which He judged to be necessary if humanity was to survive the never-ceasing threats to its existence embodied by Chaos, myriad xenos races and its own fragile human nature.
The Emperor realized that to reunite all of humanity, He would need generals and proconsuls in addition to Himself whom He could trust absolutely and who possessed capabilities similar to His own. So he ordered the creation of 20 highly advanced, genetically-engineered transhumans known as the Primarchs. These men, created using the Emperor’s own genome as the foundations of their genetic code, were intended to lead the reunification of Mankind.
The Ruinous Powers of Chaos, however, fearful of the affect the Emperor’s plans would have upon their own power within the Immaterium since they were dependent upon mortals for their very existence, managed to bypass the arcane wards protecting the Emperor’s secret gene-laboratory under the Himalazian mountains, and teleport the unborn Primarchs, still in their gestation capsules, away from Terra. They were scattered across the galaxy to different human-settled worlds and several were tainted with the touch of Chaos that would bloom in time.
Facing this setback, the Emperor decided to change His tactics. He gathered the remaining genetic material that had been used to create the Primarchs and from it cultured thousands of sets of gene-seed. These could be gestated into individual sets of 19 separate organs that when implanted within the body of an adolescent human male would transform him into one of the transhuman warriors known as the Astartes, the first true Space Marines.
The Emperor raised 20 Legions of Astartes, each making use of gene-seed organs cultured from the DNA of one of the Primarchs, from among the population of a newly unified Terra. After five millennia and the birth of Slaanesh following the events that led to the Fall of the Eldar, the massive Warp Storms finally dissipated across the galaxy. With their absence allowing interstellar travel once again, the Emperor quickly moved forward with his plans to begin the conquest of the galaxy.
One more but not less important military force was created by the Emperor which called The Imperial Army. This formation was the predecessor of the Astra Militarum of the 41st Millennium, comprised of normal men and women.
As the Great Crusade progressed and more worlds needed to be liberated, the Imperium’s need for more troops increased dramatically. Even the mighty transhuman armies of the Legiones Astartes could not alone complete the task at hand.
Unlike in the present-day Imperium, where the Imperial Guard serves as Mankind’s front-line armed force in the defense of the Emperor’s realm, the Imperial Army was never anything more than a reserve force for the Imperium during the Great Crusade, and its troops were usually tasked with garrison duty or mopping-up operations.
To prevent the possibility of a large-scale interstellar rebellion from consuming the Human-settled galaxy again, the titanic armies of the Imperium were divided into three basic parts.
These included the Space Marine Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, a ground-based force of mortal soldiers that would replace the fractured Space Marine Legions as the Imperium’s front-line troops and a space-based service containing all of the Imperium’s naval assets that was responsible for all space-related transport and combat duties.
As mighty and valiant as the hosts of the Emperor were, this epic undertaking would have been entirely impossible without the countless thousands of Warp-capable vessels that transported hundreds of thousands of the superhuman warriors of the Space Marine Legions and many millions of Imperial Army soldiers from one star’s light to another.
Driven by the will of the Emperor, the first Expeditionary Fleets pushed outwards into the galaxy. Preceding each great Expeditionary Fleet of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of vessels often ranged smaller contingents of independent flotillas led by a class of martial leader that would become known as the Rogue Traders Militant. Many of these individuals were former rulers of the numerous realms the Emperor had cast down first during the Unification Wars and later as the Great Crusade spread, formerly independent human worlds.
These forces, with the technological and military aid of the Mechanicum, would bring the light of the Imperial Truth and enforce Imperial Compliance with the new regime on every human world encountered. At its peak in the early 31st Millennium, some 203 standard years after it began, there were 4,287 primary Expedition Fleets engaged upon the business of enforcing Imperial Compliance and extending the Imperial aegis across the galaxy as well as 60,000+ secondary deployment groups involved in regulating Compliance or Imperial occupations.
Internal Strife and the Horus Heresy
The Great Crusade was under the direct, personal command of the Emperor of Mankind until the great victory won against a massive Ork WAAAGH! during the Ullanor Crusade. After the defeat of the Orks achieved a new high point for the Great Crusade, the Emperor retired to Terra to begin work on a secret project deep within the Imperial Palace to open the labyrinthine interdimensional Aeldari Webway to humanity’s use so that the Imperium could be tied together as never before and forever shielded from the depredations of the Warp.
Horus Lumpercal, Primarch of XVI Legion or Luna Wolves Legion, was appointed to lead the Great Crusade. He received the title and position of Imperial Warmaster and with it the supreme command of all of the Imperium’s armed forces, Space Marines and Imperial Army starships and troops as well.
Horus was not informed of the Emperor’s plans on Terra, and felt deeply troubled by his father’s sudden unwillingness to confide in him, once his closest confidante, and by his decision to retreat to Terra with the Great Crusade yet unfinished. To make matters worse, while some of his fellow Primarchs accepted his promotion, others, chiefly Angron, Konrad Curze and Perturabo, openly begrudged Horus his new authority.
There was also the widespread erroneous belief among the Astartes that the Emperor would disband or reduce the Space Marine Legions to the level of peacekeeping forces once the Great Crusade was completed. Horus resented his brothers’ feelings and thought that while he was winning new worlds for the Imperium the Emperor was handing the Imperium he, his brothers and the Astartes had won to corrupt mortal bureaucrats and Terran nobles who knew nothing of honor or sacrifice. These existing seeds of bitterness, jealousy and pain were all the Ruinous Powers of Chaos needed to sow the seeds of dissension in the Warmaster’s mind.
Events came to a head following Horus’ wounding at the end of the Great Crusade during a battle on the moon of Davin against Nurgleite undead by the Chaos-tainted weapon known as the Kinebrach Anathame that had been wielded by the Nurgle-corrupted former Planetary Governor of Davin, Eugen Temba. Even Horus’ superhuman immune system could not defeat the terrible Nurgle-created toxin that had laced the blade of the Anathame, and in their desperation to save his life, the Captains of the Luna Wolves gave in to the machinations of the Word Bearers Legion’s First Chaplain Erebus and gave Horus into the keeping of the Chaos Sorcerers of the Temple of the Serpent Lodge on Davin.
As part of their “healing” ritual, the sorcerers sent Horus’ mind into the Warp, where Erebus, the First Chaplain of the Word Bearers Legion who had long served Chaos, acting as the agent of the Dark Gods, sought to corrupt him. Erebus used a deceptive vision of the future of the Imperium where the Emperor was worshiped as a god to convince Horus, who was filled with jealousy at the sight of thousands of pilgrims worshiping in a grand cathedral dedicated to the Emperor, to replace his father as the master of the galaxy.
When Horus awakened fully healed, he awoke already corrupted, ready in his terrible ambition to turn on his father and attempt to wrest control of the Imperium from the Emperor no matter the cost. In return for his allegiance to their cause, the Chaos Gods offered Horus the power of the Warp, cementing the corruption of his soul.
The Imperial Warmaster Horus Lumpercal renamed his legion in Sons of Horus Legion and unleashed the terrible interstellar civil war known as the Horus Heresy. He convinced half of the other Primarchs and Space Marine Legions, as well as large amount of the Imperial Army and the forces of the Mechanicum, to turn Traitor alongside him and unleash a cataclysmic attempt to conquer the galaxy in his name.
Over 9 Terran years the war raged, 7 of them consumed by Horus’ drive on the Throneworld, until coming to a final cataclysm on Terra itself where Horus was slain and the Emperor mortally wounded, His dreams of creating a brighter future for Mankind forever broken.
The Heresy concluded with the death of the traitorous Warmaster Horus, the internment of the Emperor in the Golden Throne and the exile into the Eye of Terror of the Heretic Astartes Traitor Legions.
The Heresy was directly responsible for the birth of the present-day structure of the Space Marine Chapters following the Second Founding and the reorganisation of the Imperium by the Ultramarines’ Primarch Roboute Guilliman as lord commander of the Imperium and Imperial Regent during the Time of Rebirth in the 31st Millennium.
The Imperium’s Transformation and Modern Era
The Time of Rebirth or The Great Scouring, was the Imperium of Man’s great counter-offensive against the Traitor Legions and their allies in the service of Chaos who had occupied much of Imperial space during the Horus Heresy.
It began after the end of the Heresy following the death of the Warmaster Horus and the failure of his attempt to slay the Emperor of Mankind during the Siege of Terra.
The Traitor Legions’ associated troops from the Dark Mechanicum, the Titan Legions and the regiments and starships of the Imperial Army and Armada Imperialis that had turned to Chaos were to be destroyed or driven into the Warp rift known as the Eye of Terror.
Many Chaos-corrupted star systems were cleansed and placed under the watch of the newborn Inquisition. Horus death had not ended the fighting, but it had renewed the resolve of the Loyalists to destroy the Traitors.
Many Imperial worlds during the Heresy had refused to commit their forces to either side, or seceded entirely from the Imperium to regain their independence. Such indecision was punished by Loyalist and Traitor forces alike. These forces were often bled white attacking the rebel strongholds of worlds that only wanted to be free of the Imperium entirely, whether it swore allegiance to the Emperor or to the Dark Gods.
Changes swept both the imperial military and the offices of government. The Space Marine Legions, the vast fighting formations so instrumental in Mankind’s victories during the Great Crusade, were broken down into many smaller chapters comprised of 1,000 Astartes. Overseen by Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch of the Ultramarines Legion and the Lord Commander of the Imperium in the wake of the Emperor’s “ascension”, he penned his magnum opus, the Codex Astartes – a great and sacred tome which covered every conceivable topic of military organization, strategy and tactics.
This transition allowed for greater tactical flexibility without placing the command of an entire Space Marine Legion into the hands of one individual – never again would the awesome power of one hundred thousand Space Marines be misused.
The original First Founding Space Marine Legions were divided into smaller Successor Chapters – one Chapter maintained their parent Legion’s original name, badge and colors, while the remaining Chapters took new names and heraldry. These original Chapters are known as the Second Founding Chapters, an event which occurred in the early 31st Millennium and coincided with the beginning of what was known as the Reformation of the Imperium.
Another vast change wrought upon the Imperium’s mighty military redefined the nature of the Imperial Army. Once including both the great battleships that plied the stars and the countless mortal soldiers that landed to fight planetside, now the two were divided into the Imperial Navy and Astra Militarum, colloquially known as the “Imperial Guard.”
Across all the agencies of the Imperium, offices and institutions were split, their previous responsibilities fractionalized into separate functions and departments. Many of the countless branches within the sprawling Adeptus Administratum were spawned at this time.
With the instigation of these changes, it was not unusual for two separate organizations, each unaware of the other, to be tasked with the same jobs, such as verificator scribes and tithe enumerators poring over the same data, each producing the same reports.
These byzantine systems were put in place as fail-safe measures, which have since spiraled out of control into administrative excess.
Beyond any such bureaucracies, and standing watch over all, was the newly formed Inquisition, a secretive paramilitary police organization outside the established hierarchies. Ever vigilant, its role was to question everything in the constant search for threats to Humanity. None save the Emperor Himself escape the Inquisition’s uncompromising and watchful gaze.
The Imperium of Man at the end of the 41st Millennium is a dystopic society. The unexpected horrors of the Horus Heresy fatally weakened the nascent Imperium, but more importantly, starting with the Emperor Himself, claimed some of its best warriors, technocrats, administrators and diplomats who fell either in battle with the Traitor Legions or were corrupted by Chaos themselves.
But perhaps the most significant consequence seems to have been that like the Emperor, the Imperium itself entered a slowly decaying stasis, while Chaos and the Imperium’s myriad xenos enemies are ascendant.
The period following the Heresy was one of near-anarchy, and the continuity of the Imperium was not assured. Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch of the Ultramarines, was one of those credited with taking decisive action that kept the Imperium together as its ruling Lord Commander, possibly with the help of other Loyalist forces and of new Imperial organizations such as the Inquisition and the Officio Assassinorum.
Supreme twist is the deification of the Emperor and the attendant creation of the Ecclesiarchy, the galaxy-wide state church dedicated to the Imperial Creed that teaches that the Emperor is the god of Mankind. The Emperor’s express purpose and one of the pillars of the pre-Heresy Imperial doctrine known as the Imperial Truth that was spread by the Imperial forces during the Great Crusade was the elimination of superstition and of belief in supernatural powers, gods, and religion and the promotion of reason and science.
One more significant problem of the Emperium has been the lack of a real technological progress over the thousands years and fear of unknown or ancient technology that sometimes borders on irrational superstition.
In short, the Imperium has become a repressive regime marked by extreme levels of superstition, political repression, religious intolerance, bureaucratisation, economic stagnation, technological regression and inequality. Corruption and injustice are rampant and Human life is increasingly worth very little in a galaxy teeming with trillions of people.
Things have only been made worse with the birth of the Great Rift or Cicatrix Maledictum in the 41st Millennium – a massive Warp Rift comprised of continuous and permanently raging Warp storms that now stretches across the galaxy from the Eye of Terror to the Hadex Anomaly.
Its emergence was a literal galaxy-shattering event, which threw the Imperium of Man into chaos and ushered in new wars across nearly every world in the Emperor’s domain. So powerful and far-reaching was this Warp rift that the very laws of physics fray at its edges as the inconsistencies of temporal fluctuations, once largely localised to larger Warp Storms such as the Eye of Terror, spread across the galaxy.
On the far side of the galaxy-spanning Warp rift from Holy Terra, things have quite literally gone to hell. There, the light of the Astronomican is obscured behind a psychic maelstrom of nightmares and the entire region has been named the Imperium Nihilus, or the Dark Imperium. Many of those planets in the vicinity of the Great Rift have disappeared entirely, or been so corrupted that they are now labelled as Daemon Worlds. The regions of the galaxy on the near side of the rift, known as the Imperium Sanctus, still bathe in the light of the Emperor, but are under no less pressure from the still-growing threat of Chaos.
In response to the emerging forces of Chaos throughout the galaxy, the primarch of the Ultramarines and now the Lord Commander of the Imperium, Roboute Guilliman has launched Indomitus Crusade. He gathered new armada along with elements of the Adeptus Custodes, a small contingent of the Silent Sisterhood, a vast war host of Primaris Space Marines from many newly founded Chapters and strike forces from over a dozen pre-existing Chapters of Space Marines, led by the Imperial Fists. This campaign with its Imperium-altering course gives name to this new period of Imperial history – the Era Indomitus.
Thus began many new legends as Guilliman and the other Indomitus fleets travelled to aid beleaguered Imperial planets, breaking sieges and sweeping away invaders to bring hope back to the desperate defenders. It was not long before word began to spread, as those worlds that could still receive astropathic messages hailed the return of a hero out of myth. Once more, one of the demigods of the past fought for the Imperium of Mankind.
Whether the nobles of the Imperium like it or not, the Imperium will either begin to change at the direction of its resurrected lord commander, or it will die, the throats of its people cut by the myriad wolves already circling its shattered realms…
What is the probability that our species and our history can go the same path…
Feel free to share your opinion in the comment section and leave your mark in chronicles of the Endless War.
