Event · M36
Fourteenth Founding
The Fourteenth Founding is a numbered Space Marine founding event sanctioned by the Adeptus Terra, one in the sequence following the Second Founding, which had broken the surviving Legiones Astartes into smaller Chapters after the Horus Heresy. Convened in the thirty-sixth millennium, it is recorded as a response to attrition among standing Chapters and to the Imperium’s ongoing need for dependable Astartes strength across contested sectors. As with the Foundings before and after it, authorisation and record-keeping ran through Terra, where the Adeptus Terra oversaw the allocation of gene-seed and the chartering of new Chapters. Gene-seed for the Fourteenth Founding is recorded as drawn from established gene-sire Chapters, in keeping with the Codex Astartes tradition of tithing genetic stock to raise successor formations. The Chapters raised under this Founding were dispatched to reinforce Imperial holdings and to answer local campaigns of the era, adding to Astartes numbers without altering the Chapter structure laid down since the Second Founding. Accounts of the individual Chapters and deployments tied to the Fourteenth Founding are incomplete; later tradition holds that a full roster survives only in fragmentary form within Terran administrative archives. In the present era the Fourteenth Founding is remembered chiefly as a marker within the broader chronology of Astartes founding events, standing between the well-documented Second Founding and later, more closely scrutinised Foundings such as the Cursed Founding, whose flawed gene-seed lines drew lasting attention. Its place in Imperial record-keeping ties it to Terra as the seat of the founding process and to the wider sequence of Foundings that shaped the Adeptus Astartes across the galaxy. As with other sparsely attested Foundings, much of its detail remains uncertain, and it is best understood as one step in the Imperium’s long effort to sustain its Space Marine Chapters through the millennia.
See where Fourteenth Founding occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.