Event · M30
Battle of Mount Ararat
The Battle of Mount Ararat was an engagement of the Unification Wars, fought on Terra in the thirtieth millennium as the Emperor extended his rule. The Unification Wars were the long series of campaigns in which the Emperor subdued the warlords, technocratic polities and rival powers that had divided the planet after the Age of Strife. Mount Ararat is recorded as one of the strongholds contested in that effort, and the engagement is remembered chiefly as part of the wider process by which Terra was brought under a single authority. The Emperor’s campaigns on Terra were spearheaded by the Thunder Warriors, his first genetically engineered soldiers, supported by conventional armies and by the technology he had gathered in the preceding decades. Accounts of the fighting at Mount Ararat itself are sparse, and its order of battle, its commanders on the opposing side and the exact sequence of events are not firmly established. Later tradition places it among the decisive actions that broke organised resistance in its region, but details beyond that outline should be treated with caution. In the timeline, the battle belongs to the closing phase of the Unification Wars, shortly before the Emperor turned his attention from Terra to the stars. Once the planet was unified, the Great Crusade was launched. The Thunder Warriors, who had been created for the wars of unification, were in time superseded by the Legiones Astartes. On the Orrery map the battle is anchored to Terra, and it is best read alongside the Unification Wars, the Thunder Warriors and the later Great Crusade, which it helps to connect.
See where Battle of Mount Ararat occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.