Event · M41–M42
Reign of Blood
The Reign of Blood was the final, most violent phase of the Age of Apostasy, when High Lord Vandire ruled Terra through terror rather than law. Having concentrated the offices of Ecclesiarch and Master of the Administratum in his own person during the thirty-sixth millennium, Vandire governed as an autocrat answerable to no council, and in his last years abandoned the pretence of legitimate rule entirely in favour of open repression against any who questioned him. Vandire’s authority rested on the Frateris Templar, the Ecclesiarchy’s private soldiery known to the Terran populace as the Brides of the Emperor, and on an Adeptus Arbites he turned against dissenting administrators, hive populations, and even fellow High Lords of Terra. Entire districts were subjected to mass reprisals as Vandire sought to root out conspiracy, real or imagined, and the resulting toll gave the period its name. Resistance coalesced around Confessor Sebastian Thor of Ophelia VII, who rallied disaffected clergy, Administratum officials, and elements of the High Lords against the tyranny, culminating in an uprising that carried the fighting to the gates of the Ecclesiarchal Palace itself. Vandire was slain within the palace by his own bodyguard, Alicia Dominica, an act later remembered as the founding deed of the Orders Militant that grew into the Adepta Sororitas. In the aftermath, Thor convened the Synod of Terra, which enacted the Decree Passive stripping the Ecclesiarchy of standing armies save for the Sororitas and placing the Ministorum under closer oversight of the wider Imperium. Thor himself was afterwards venerated for ending the tyranny, and the Reign of Blood came to mark the close of the Age of Apostasy in Imperial memory.
See where Reign of Blood occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.