Event · M30–M31

Razing of Monarchia

The Razing of Monarchia refers to the destruction, during the later years of the Great Crusade, of the shrine-city of Monarchia on the world of Khur, raised by the Word Bearers Legion under their primarch, Lorgar Aurelian, and levelled on the order of the Emperor of Mankind. Monarchia, styled by its builders as the Perfect City, had been constructed on Khur as the foremost monument to a faith that the Word Bearers had cultivated across their compliant worlds: the veneration of the Emperor as a divine being, father and god of humanity. This stood in direct opposition to the Imperial Truth, the secular rationalism that officially underpinned the Great Crusade and denied the Emperor any divine status. Where other Legions pressed forward with conquest, the Word Bearers under Lorgar had for some time devoted considerable energy to proselytising among newly compliant populations, raising temples and cathedrals in the Emperor’s honour rather than simply securing worlds and moving on. This devotional turn had already drawn the Emperor’s displeasure, reaching its culmination in a direct rebuke to Lorgar that his Legion had been created for war, not worship, and that the Space Marines were instruments of conquest rather than missionaries of belief. Monarchia, as the physical embodiment of this unsanctioned faith, became the object of the Emperor’s judgement. Roboute Guilliman, primarch of the Ultramarines, was charged with the city’s destruction, and his Legion duly bombarded and razed Monarchia from orbit and upon the ground. The destruction of the city was followed by a further, deliberately public humiliation. With Guilliman standing witness, the Emperor compelled Lorgar and the assembled Word Bearers Legion to kneel amid the ashes of Monarchia, a chastisement intended to impress upon them, and upon those who observed it, the primacy of the Imperial Truth over religious devotion. Lorgar is said to have withdrawn into a prolonged silence afterwards, mourning the loss of his city and his Legion’s purpose for some weeks, during which he confided chiefly in two of his closest counsellors, Erebus and Kor Phaeron. It was in the counsel of these two figures, offered in the aftermath of the Emperor’s rebuke, that the primarch’s grief and resentment are held to have been turned toward darker ends, setting the Word Bearers upon the path that would draw them toward the worship of the Ruinous Powers. The razing is generally dated to some forty-three years before the opening of the Horus Heresy. In the years following, Lorgar undertook a pilgrimage beyond the bounds of compliant space, a journey that carried him eventually to Cadia and to the Eye of Terror, where the Word Bearers’ communion with the warp and its powers was to deepen beyond recall.

See where Razing of Monarchia occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

Open in universe