Event · M41
Corinthian Crusade
The Corinthian Crusade was a forty-first-millennium Imperial campaign fought to contain an Ork empire risen around Corinth. The crusade is recorded as having been called in response to the rapid consolidation of Ork clans across the Corinth system and its neighbouring approaches, where a warlord’s dominion had grown from scattered raiding bands into what Imperial cartographers termed an Ork empire, threatening shipping lanes and Imperial holdings well beyond its immediate borders. Accounts differ as to the exact scale of the threat before the Imperium’s response was organised, though the convening of a crusade force, rather than a lesser punitive expedition, indicates that the danger was judged to extend past Corinth itself and into the wider region. Ultramarines detachments are recorded among the crusade’s leading elements, operating alongside Astra Militarum regiments and Imperial Navy squadrons tasked with severing the Ork empire’s supply and reinforcement routes before the reduction of its fortified holdings could begin in earnest. The fighting is described as having ranged across Corinth and the neighbouring systems drawn into the Ork empire’s orbit, with Imperial forces advancing world by world rather than committing to a single decisive engagement, a pattern consistent with the difficulty of dislodging an Ork power once it has taken root across several worlds at once. No single battle is remembered as having settled the crusade’s outcome; rather, later tradition holds that the Ork empire’s cohesion failed by degrees as its constituent clans were cut off from one another and reduced in turn. The Corinthian Crusade is remembered as having broken the Ork empire centred on Corinth, though surviving clans are said to have dispersed rather than being annihilated outright, seeding further Ork activity in the surrounding region for generations afterward. Corinth itself passed back into Imperial reckoning as a consequence, restored as a fixed point on Imperial charts of the sector. The crusade stands alongside the wider record of Ultramarines campaigns against Ork empires as one of the recurring contests between the Chapter and the greenskin powers it has met across the millennia, contemporary with the broader pattern of Ork resurgence and Imperial reconquest that marks the era.
See where Corinthian Crusade occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.