UNIFICATION WARS
The Unification Wars, also known as the Wars of Unification, the Unity Wars, The Unification or just The Unity, were a series of conflicts fought on Terra beginning in the 29th Millennium at the end of the Age of Strife and lasting into the middle centuries of the 30th Millennium.
By the late 29th Millennium, it has been nearly three hundred Terran centuries since Mankind first left the polluted, used-up carcass of what was once known as Earth for the unknown bounties and perils of the stars beyond the world of its birth. In those forgotten early days of the Age of Technology it is now unknown what enemies and trials humanity had to overcome but overcome them we did, and in doing so human colonies spread across our galaxy so that humanity was scattered across a million worlds and found treasures and horrors uncounted. In the heights of those times, lost now to all but supposition and myth, humanity made themselves as unto gods -- their sciences and arts able to remake planets in the image of remembered Ancient Earth, harness the power of the stars, and fashion servants from clay and iron and give them counterfeit-life to do their bidding. Thus was the Dark Age of Technology forged and for millennia it reigned, until almost at a stroke the dominion of humanity fell and was undone in a maelstrom of brutality and ignorance and untold billions died, their screams unanswered and unheard. Fandom may earn an affiliate commission on sales made from links on this page. During the turbulent era known later as the Age of Strife or by some as "Old Night," the Sol System and Old Earth, or Terra as it is now known, and the nearby star systems that had been colonised by humanity during the Dark Age of Technology were effectively cut off from interstellar travel or communication with each other. This was due to the massive Warp Storms that swept the galaxy as the Immaterium was roiled by the millennia-long gestation of the Chaos God Slaanesh and the turbulence that marked the decay of the Aeldari Empire before the Fall. During this dark time, Terra sometimes held sway over the Sol System, while at other times the rulers of Mars or Luna were dominant. The different worlds found themselves constantly at war. During this long, 5,000-year-period of anarchy, fear and violence, Old Earth's once unified planetary government had completely broken down and been divided into dozens of warring states of so-called "techno-barbarians." Continuous warfare raged across the surface of Terra for 2500 standard years, beginning in the middle centuries of the 27th Millennium. Across the galaxy things were little better, as the human colony worlds, bereft of central authority or protection, and with the web of support and supply that had maintained the threads of civilisation cut, fell into anarchy and war. Human civilisation was torn apart as local factions and pocket empires fought for control in the shattered realm while others, utterly cut off from aid, succumbed to the horrors of planet-wide famine, insanity and worse -- the perils of the Warp. The existence of Warp creatures and the dangers they posed to the human mind were then barely understood. On worlds with large concentrations of emergent psykers the entities from beyond were able to breach the barrier between the Immaterium and corporeal reality and it cannot be known or guessed how many worlds were ravaged or swallowed whole by their incursions. As human civilisation fragmented, hundreds of alien species and enemies unknown seized their chance for revenge on humanity for its past conquests, or to plunder unprotected worlds and enslave their populations. Hundreds of human-inhabited star systems were sacked and ravaged, their peoples slaughtered, mutilated or stolen. Those that survived the alien onslaught rapidly reverted to barbarism, stripped of civilisation, knowledge and culture in the raw battle to simply endure. Humanity, standing on the brink of total annihilation and endless night, gathered round its children. Alone and beset by internal strife, famine and plague, under incessant attack by aliens and facing the peril of Warp incursions, the human worlds that survived were pitiable shadows of what they had once been in an age when Mankind's dead far outnumbered its living.
For those few with time to spare thought to such matters it seemed as if there were no hope and no help -- the end times were at hand -- a slow bitter decay into destruction was all that any could see as humanity's future, and no force imaginable could save Mankind and free it from its hellish bondage. But they would be proved wrong. During the Age of Strife, Terra, the birthÂworld of humanity, had descended into savagery and horror the equal of any. Little remained of the once sophisticated civilisation of Old Earth's glorious past as the centre of a growing human interstellar civilisation marked by advanced science, high culture and wondrous technologies. Techno-barbarian warlords and their warrior hordes continuously fought over the planet, which had become little more than a massive battleground for their wars of attrition. They made use of chemical, biological and even thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction, and slowly transformed the cradle of Mankind into a battered, post-apocalyptic wasteland across most of its scarred surface. Long before left parlous and polluted, generations of war made the planet a wasteland punctuated by fortified holdfasts built amid the wreckage of lost civilisations, and its inhabitants a mass of degenerate, feral nomads. Insane prophets, cyber-augmented burcher-kings, vivisecror-warlords and religious demagogues led the warring tribes of Ancient Earth, and the world was wracked by never-ending conflict as one tyrant displaced another. Petty empires rose and disintegrated; tribes formed, were destroyed and re-formed as diminishing, brutalised shadows of lost glories and forgotten triumphs. Uncounted billions died unknown and unremembered, while whispered names such as the "Unspeakable King" and the "Seven Neverborn" left legends to terrify generations to come. Anarchy and bloodshed was lord over all. Mark 1 Helm It was against this backdrop of oppression, violence and casual brutality that the Emperor of Mankind first revealed Himself to the people of Terra beginning in the 29th Millennium as a warlord more powerful than any other. In secret, He had been planning for this moment in history for millennia, ever since the Age of Strife had fractured what remained of the ancient human federation which had once stretched across the galaxy. With His massive army of genetically-enhanced warriors 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 nations into a unified planetary government. But the Emperor's true power lay in His rationality and foresight, and His mastery of science was as unequalled as His might as a warrior, although few suspected the true range of His powers and abilities.
The Emperor conquered great swathes of Old Earth and those that would not join Him He destroyed, but His was a conquest not merely born of blood and ambition, His was a higher calling. Where His dominion reigned the idols of fear and blind faith were cast down, and order and rationality were raised up in their place. He intended to use the unified Terra as the springboard from which to begin His reconquest of the galaxy under the aegis of an Imperium of Man dedicated to the Imperial Truth of progress and reason. Brutal rulers such as the warlord Kalagann of Ursh, Cardinal Tang of the Yndonesic Bloc, and the most infamous of all, the half-mad, half-genius Narthan Dume, the Tyrant of the Pan-Pacific Empire, would all fall by the wayside. Of particular note was the Ninth Battle of Xozer fought by the Emperor's armies against Ursh in 992.M29. In the Nordafrik Conclaves inexplicable ephemeral phenomenon of psychic origin were encountered during the battle where Kalagann, the techno-barbarian warlord of Ursh, was finally slain. The kingdom of Ursh was then brought to heel by the Emperor's forces. Once unleashed, 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. RaptorImperialis The Raptor Imperialis, early symbol of the Emperor of Mankind and His Imperium During this time the Emperor created a number of military organisations, such as the Imperial Army, which would become the nucleus of the armed forces that would support his Legiones Astartes and his reconquest of the human-settled galaxy. Amongst the early units that saw action during the Unification Wars were such venerable regiments as the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, which would become one of the oldest and most respected regiments within the later Imperial Army. Like many of these early regiments, the geno-soldiers were created through the use of some of the Emperor's sophisticated genetic engineering techniques, developed in His laboratories beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains and among the Selenar gene-wrights on Luna. The most elite of this first generation of genetically-engineered supersoldiers were known as the Thunder Warriors, men who were physically stronger and more formidable in combat than even the later Space Marines, though they were engineered to be vicious killers and lacked many of the more noble aspects of the later Astartes as well as their tremendously long lifespans.
Another source claims that even before the Unification Wars had ended, the Thunder Warriors at last realised that their creator had cursed them with short lifespans as a result of their imperfect genetic augmentations, and turned upon Him for what they saw as His betrayal. It was a cadre of several hundred Custodians, even then believed to have been led by the legendary Constantin Valdor, and accompanied by several thousand prototype Astartes of the I Legion of the newborn Space Marines, that stood in the Emperor's defence, carrying out a merciless culling of the obsolete and rebellious gene-soldiers. Though some Thunder Warriors successfully escaped the cull, however it happened, the vast majority of those who survived the Unification Wars died at the hands of their own allies. By the time the Unification Wars began, the human homeworld's population had suffered through the horrors of the Age of Strife, a period punctuated by constant warfare and the use of weapons of mass destruction that had badly damaged the environment of Old Earth. Under the Emperor's rulership, humanity would be restored, intellectually, spiritually and physically to the heights it had once known, and the shackles of darkness cast aside. 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.
Oceans of Terra
By the time of the Unification Wars in the 29th and 30th Millenniums there was only one remaining ocean on Terra -- the so-called "Great Ocean" -- which was the ancient Pacific Ocean. The size of the Pacific was vastly smaller than it once was, due to the vaporisation of a massive stretch of the ocean during the nuclear wars that had consumed much of Old Earth in the lost years of the Age of Strife. This missing portion of the Pacific stretched from the Marianas Trench down past Australia and all the way to the frozen continent of Antarctica. The Atlantic Ocean had also been largely vaporised as that great body of water that had once been near Europe was now mostly gone, particularly to the south of what had been the Iberian Peninsula. Other, smaller, bodies of water may still have remained during this time, as a great body of water is recorded to have been present in the region of Eurasia where the Caspian Sea had lain in ages past. These seas and oceans still existed at the start of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium, but by the time of the 41st Millennium, Terra had no free-standing bodies of water, having become a true ecumenopolis, a world completely covered by the dense urban areas of massive hive cities. Within these human hives toiled the tens of billions of Adeptus Terra bureaucrats and serfs required to keep the decaying heart of the Imperium of Man pumping.
Sources
Codex: Adeptus Custodes (8th Edition), pg. 9
Realms of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned (1st Edition), pp. 175-180
The Horus Heresy - Book One: Betrayal (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 14-15, 16, 21, 26
Warhammer 40,000: Compendium, "History of Space Marine Armour"
-Flight of the Eisenstein (Novel) by James Swallow, pp. 20, 92, 283
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Master of Mankind (Novel) by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Ch. 6
Vengeful Spirit (Novel) by Graham McNeill