Event · M31
Saturnine assault
The Saturnine assault was a Traitor offensive against the defences of Terra during the Siege of Terra, in the closing phase of the Horus Heresy. It belongs to the thirty-first millennium (M31), when the forces of the Warmaster Horus brought the civil war to the Throneworld itself. The assault is recorded as one stage within the larger siege rather than a separate war, and it is best read in that context: an attempt to break the Imperial Palace’s defences before relief could reach Terra. The assault arose from the strategic position of the siege. Horus had committed the Traitor Legions to a direct attack on the Emperor’s seat of power, and the defenders, under the Imperial Fists and their Primarch Rogal Dorn, held the Palace’s walls and gates against successive waves. The Traitor side is associated with the Sons of Horus and with siege specialists such as the Iron Warriors under Perturabo, while the loyalist defence drew on the Imperial Fists, the Custodian Guard, the Sisters of Silence and the mortal Imperial Army. Accounts differ on the exact allocation of forces within this particular phase, and this entry does not assign units where the record is unclear. Its consequences are those of the siege as a whole. The assault failed to end the defence of Terra, but it increased the strain on the Palace garrison and moved the campaign towards its final confrontation between Horus and the Emperor. On the Orrery map the event is anchored to Terra, and on the timeline it sits within the Siege of Terra, alongside the Horus Heresy, the Imperial Palace and the Imperial Fists, which are its most direct neighbours in the graph.
See where Saturnine assault occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.