History
The Imperium is established on Terra (Earth) in the 30th millennium AD as the planet's sole authority; several centuries later, it embarks on a Great Crusade, an interstellar crusade intended to bring all human-settled worlds in the Milky Way galaxy under its banner. Over the course of two Terran centuries, the Crusade reaches star systems more than 50,000 light years away from its original staging point in the Sol (Solar) System, assimilates millions of worlds into the Imperium, and gives Humankind a dominant position among the galaxy's species; according to Imperial propaganda, it is humanity's "Manifest Destiny" to rule the galaxy.
Early in the 31st millennium, the Crusade comes to a sudden stop as the Imperium is nearly torn asunder in a galaxy-wide civil war known as the Horus Heresy; the war decimates and eventually redefines the Imperium. Following the Horus Heresy, the crippled institution undergoes a centuries-long, often violent rebuilding.
Read more about this topic: Imperium (Warhammer 40,000)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)