Category:Fourth Founding

The 4th Founding of Space Marines occurred several solar decades after the disastrous events of the War of the Beast ended in 546.M32 -- the massive WAAAGH! of the Ork warlord known only as The Beast -- which laid waste to much of the known galaxy and threatened to destroy Terra itself.

Following the successful eradication of the massive greenskin invasion force and the defeat of its Warlord, the Lord Commander of the Imperium Maximus Thane, the former Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar, and now the newly-appointed commander of the reconstituted Imperial Fists, decreed that the Imperium would raise as many new Chapters as they had gene-seed in the great vaults of Terra to sustain.

All Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes were ordered to release a portion of their Veterans to provide the initial basis for this Founding, the greatest since the First Founding. Gene-seed tithing would be doubled for the next standard century to replenish the vaults. When it was done, there would be hundreds of Chapters to ring the Imperium in adamantium and ceramite instead of dozens.

After enough gene-seed had been collected in the Mechanicus vaults on Terra, the High Lords of Terra authorised the 4th Founding of the Adeptus Astartes, sometime in the middle centuries of the 32nd Millennium, to help bring order to an Imperium rife with civil strife and insurrection, and to help restore Imperial law.