Event · M41
Tenth Black Crusade
The Tenth Black Crusade is recorded as one of the thirteen Chaos offensives launched from the Eye of Terror against the Imperium of Man. Tradition attributes the whole sequence to Abaddon the Despoiler, Warmaster of Chaos and leader of the Black Legion, who set out to break the Imperium’s hold on the regions around the Eye. Each crusade drew on Traitor Legions, renegade warbands and daemonic allies gathered under his authority. Like the others, the Tenth is placed in the forty-first millennium, and it belongs to the long run of assaults that preceded the final campaign. The surviving record for this particular crusade is sparse, and accounts differ on its exact dating, its targets and the forces committed. Black Crusades of this period usually followed one pattern. Fleets left the Eye of Terror, most often by way of the Cadian Gate, and struck at the Segmentum Obscurus and neighbouring sectors. The Imperial Navy, the Astra Militarum and the Adeptus Astartes then met them, with Cadian regiments and the fortress worlds of the Cadian Sector at the centre of the defence. Because no distinct sequence of battles is securely attested for the Tenth, it is best read as a step in that wider pattern, not as a self-contained war. The outcome was, in the general run of these campaigns, a Chaos withdrawal to the Eye of Terror after losses on both sides. Abaddon kept his command and his aim of a decisive breakthrough. The thirteenth and last crusade began in 999.M41, brought the fall of Cadia and led to the opening of the Great Rift, which divided the galaxy into the Imperium Sanctus and the Imperium Nihilus. For that reason the Tenth Black Crusade matters mainly as one link in the chain leading to the Thirteenth. Readers can follow it through Abaddon, the Eye of Terror and the Cadian Sector on the Orrery map and timeline.
See where Tenth Black Crusade occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.