Event · M30–M31
Razing of Monarchia
The Razing of Monarchia was the Emperor’s destruction of the Word Bearers’ monument-city on Cyrene, sister world to Colchis, during the Great Crusade. Lorgar, primarch of the Word Bearers, had raised his Legion in a culture of faith inherited from Colchis’s Covenant, and after the Great Crusade’s early campaigns he directed his warriors to found Monarchia as a shrine-city glorifying the Emperor as a living god. The Emperor, committed to the secular Imperial Truth and troubled by reports of the Legion’s religious fervour, regarded the city and its cult of worship as a direct contradiction of the Crusade’s founding purpose. Arriving at Cyrene with a small escort that included the primarchs Roboute Guilliman and Corax, the Emperor confronted Lorgar before his own people and condemned Monarchia as an act of heresy against the Imperial Truth. On the Emperor’s order, Guilliman’s and Corax’s forces bombarded the city from orbit and razed its temples and monuments to rubble, an act later remembered among the Word Bearers as the Reproach. Lorgar was made to watch the city he had built fall, and was afterwards ordered to attend the Council of Nikaea, where the Emperor’s ban on unsanctioned belief among the Legiones Astartes was formalised. The destruction of Monarchia, conventionally dated to around 006.M31, left Lorgar humiliated and estranged from the Emperor’s favour, a wound his mentor Kor Phaeron and the chaplain Erebus later worked to deepen. Rather than abandon his search for a power worthy of worship, Lorgar turned inward and, on a subsequent pilgrimage beyond the Imperium’s borders, encountered the entities that would draw the Word Bearers toward the Chaos Gods. The Razing is remembered as a formative injury of the Great Crusade, one that accounts of the Horus Heresy trace as a direct antecedent to the Word Bearers’ rebellion and Lorgar’s role in inciting Horus against the Emperor.
See where Razing of Monarchia occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.