Event · M35–M36
Nova Terra Interregnum
The Nova Terra Interregnum was a prolonged schism within the Imperium of Man, in which a breakaway sector in the galaxy’s eastern reaches rejected the. Imperial chronology places the rupture in the thirty-fifth millennium, a period already thin on reliable record-keeping, and later Administratum accounts differ on the precise span of the secession, offering only that it endured across successive generations before the sector’s reconquest. The region took its name, Nova Terra, from the rebel authorities’ claim to constitute a second, purer seat of Imperial rule, independent of the Terran throne and its Ecclesiarchy. The schism is recorded as arising from a local governing hierarchy’s decision to sever contact with Terra, citing the failures of distant oversight to protect and provision a sector so far from the Astronomican’s most reliable reach. In the course of the Interregnum, the breakaway authorities cultivated their own interpretation of the Emperor’s cult, a divergence that hardened the rift into doctrinal as well as political terms and made eventual reconciliation harder than simple reconquest. No individual commanders of the schism are reliably attested in surviving Imperial record; the affair is remembered institutionally, as a sector’s defection and its costly recovery, rather than through named protagonists on either side. The Interregnum’s end restored Nova Terra to Imperial rule, but later tradition holds that the episode left a lasting mark on the Ecclesiarchy and the wider Adeptus Terra, feeding the climate of suspicion and doctrinal rigour that shaped the Imperium’s approach to frontier governance in the centuries that followed, and which later commentators connect to the anxieties preceding the Age of Apostasy. As a event anchored to the Nova Terra sector on the galactic map, it stands among the thirty-fifth millennium’s cautionary episodes of Imperial fragmentation, a contemporary of the slow accumulation of grievances that would culminate in Goge Vandire’s Reign of Blood, and a reference point for later schisms and secessions elsewhere in the Imperium’s history.
See where Nova Terra Interregnum occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.