Category:First Founding

The First Founding of the Space Marine Legions, also called the Legiones Astartes, occurred in ca. 700.M30 after the end of the Age of Strife and during the Unification Wars that founded the Imperium of Man on Terra.

Twenty Space Marine Legions were created from the gene-seed of the 20 superhuman primarchs engineered by the Emperor of Mankind from His own genetic code in His gene-laboratories beneath the Imperial Palace on Terra in the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains.

In spite of the fact that the primarchs were separated from the Emperor of Mankind through the mysterious actions of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos and scattered through the Warp across the galaxy, He managed to keep a complete sample of each primarch's DNA.

The Emperor used these templates to create the first Space Marines by genetically enhancing His own Terran-born soldiers with the gene-seed derived from each primarch's genome.

The Space Marine Legions born of this process were used to complete the Unification Wars on Terra and then to initiate the Great Crusade to reunite all of Mankind's scattered colony worlds across the galaxy.

With each primarch the Emperor re-discovered during the course of the Great Crusade, He gave command of the Space Marine Legion created from their genetic material back to them. Each primarch then set up their Legion's headquarters on his homeworld, from which they also recruited new Space Marines into the Legion.

Two other Legions, the II^nd Legion and the XI^th Legion and their primarchs, were created by the Emperor, but nothing is known of what became of these Legions and their primarchs and all data pertaining to them was deliberately deleted from Imperial records before the start of the Horus Heresy.