Event · M31–M41
Black Crusades
The Black Crusades are the thirteen great offensives launched by the forces of Chaos against the Imperium of Man from the Eye of Terror. Each was mounted when an exceptional Chaos Champion (a mortal or daemonic warlord favoured by the Ruinous Powers) proved strong enough to unite the fractious warbands sheltering within that warp rift under a single banner. Since the closing centuries of the 31st Millennium this title has belonged chiefly to Ezekyle Abaddon, Warmaster of the Black Legion and self-proclaimed heir to the arch-traitor Horus, who is recorded as having led all thirteen crusades between 781.M31 and 999.M41. The crusades have their origin in the aftermath of the Horus Heresy, when the Imperium’s Great Scouring drove the surviving traitor Legions into the Eye of Terror. Cut off there from the wider galaxy, the followers of Chaos turned on one another, their armies splintering into warbands loyal to rival gods, princes, and legions. Only once or twice within a millennium does a champion emerge capable of setting aside these ancient rivalries for long enough to draw the Chaos Space Marines, the Lost and the Damned, the Dark Mechanicum, and the daemon hosts of the warp into a single crusading force. Abaddon’s First Black Crusade, recorded as beginning in 781.M31, struck the fortress world of Cadia, where he claimed the daemon sword Drach’nyen; Cadia and the surrounding gate would remain a recurring target for the crusades that followed. Later campaigns are attested with varying precision: the Twelfth Black Crusade, known as the Gothic War, opened in 139.M41 as an attempt to seize the ancient xenos war-stations called the Blackstone Fortresses, and was checked only after the Aeldari allied with the Imperium against it, though Abaddon withdrew with at least two of the stations intact. Behind these campaigns Abaddon is held to have pursued a longer design, the Crimson Path, using each crusade in part to identify and destroy the ancient monoliths restraining the Eye of Terror, working toward the rift’s eventual expansion to engulf Terra itself.
See where Black Crusades occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.