Event · M36
Sixteenth Founding
The Sixteenth Founding is one of the numbered Foundings ordered from Terra to raise new Space Marine Chapters for the Adeptus Astartes. It belongs to the sequence of Foundings that periodically follow the First Founding of the primarch-led Space Marine Legions, each authorised by the High Lords of Terra and the Adeptus Astartes hierarchy to draw fresh Chapters from the gene-seed and doctrine of established parent Chapters. The Sixteenth Founding is placed in the thirty-sixth millennium, a period for which Administratum record-keeping on individual Foundings becomes increasingly fragmentary, so its precise date and the full roster of Chapters it raised are not consistently attested across surviving sources. Accounts differ as to the crisis that prompted the Sixteenth Founding, though the Foundings of this era are generally associated with the Imperium’s continuing need to offset losses among the Astartes and to garrison contested or newly reclaimed sectors. As with other Foundings, the process is understood to have followed the Codex Astartes convention of dividing a parent Chapter’s gene-seed and veteran cadre to seed a new thousand-strong Chapter, which was then assigned a chapter world, a heraldry, and a mandate, before being despatched from Terra to its designated theatre. Later tradition holds that Chapters of the Sixteenth Founding served alongside those of neighbouring Foundings in the long, largely unrecorded wars of the mid-M36 era, though few individual engagements from this period survive as named battles in Imperial history. The Sixteenth Founding’s chief relationship to later history lies in its place within the wider chronology of Foundings that runs from the First Founding to more thoroughly documented episodes such as the Twenty-First and Twenty-Sixth Foundings. Few Chapters active in the present era claim descent from the Sixteenth Founding with certainty, and where such lineage is asserted it rests on Chapter tradition rather than confirmed Administratum record. It remains, in the current era, chiefly a marker in the Imperium’s Astartes chronology on Terra: a reminder that the Adeptus Astartes has been renewed many times since the Great Crusade, even where the details of a given renewal have been lost to the intervening millennia.
See where Sixteenth Founding occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.