Event · M32
Third Founding
The Third Founding was a programme of new Space Marine Chapter creation in the Imperium of Man, recorded in the 32nd Millennium and directed from Terra. It is counted as the third of the great Chapter-creation programmes, following the Second Founding, in which the Legiones Astartes were divided into Chapters in the aftermath of the Horus Heresy. Accounts differ on the exact year and on which Chapters belong to it, and later tradition sometimes groups it with neighbouring foundings. The cause was the Imperium’s continuing need for Astartes strength across a galaxy that no single force could defend. Under the principle of the Codex Astartes, each Chapter was limited to roughly one thousand battle-brothers, so more Chapters were the only means of adding strength without recreating the overmighty Legions of the Great Crusade. The order is recorded as passing through the High Lords of Terra and the Adeptus Terra, while the Adeptus Astartes supplied the gene-seed from progenitor stocks and Apothecaries; the Adeptus Mechanicus is generally associated with the equipment and fortress facilities that new Chapters required. Each new Chapter was assigned a recruiting world or region, a fortress-monastery, and a lineage traced to its progenitor. The Third Founding places the Chapters it produced between the Second Founding and the later foundings, which continue into subsequent millennia. Its map anchor is dispersed: the decision and the authority lie on Terra, while the resulting Chapters are stationed across many worlds. Its lasting consequence is the pattern of successor Chapters that the Imperium still relies on, each bound to its progenitor’s gene-seed and to the Codex-era model of organisation.
See where Third Founding occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.