Event · M37–M38
Twenty-Second Founding
The Twenty-Second Founding is one of the numbered Foundings that raised new Space Marine Chapters, dated to the thirty-seventh millennium. Like the Second Founding before it, it represents an administrative act of the Adeptus Terra rather than a single battle: an authorised division of gene-seed and command structure that brought new Chapters into being under the Codex Astartes. Such acts followed a recurring pattern in Imperial history. Losses among existing Chapters, or strategic need in a given sector, prompted the High Lords of Terra to sanction fresh musters, a process carried out jointly with the Adeptus Mechanicus forges that supplied gene-seed and matériel to the newly raised commands. The Twenty-Second Founding is no exception in method, yet its detail is thinner than that of earlier, better-catalogued Foundings: the specific Chapters raised under its authority are not consistently named across surviving chronicles, and some Chapters said to originate in this era have themselves obscured the exact circumstances of their founding, whether by tradition, security, or the simple loss of records over ten thousand years. In the wider chronology, the Twenty-Second Founding sits between the well-documented Second Founding of 001.M31 and the somewhat clearer accounts of later Foundings such as the Twenty-Third, functioning chiefly as a timeline anchor for the thirty-seventh millennium rather than as a settled roster of Chapters. Its authority traces back to the Adeptus Astartes as an institution and to Terra as the Imperium’s administrative seat, and its sparse record is itself instructive: much of the Chapters’ collective history rests on fragmentary Administratum archives rather than a complete public accounting, and the Twenty-Second Founding remains among the more obscure entries in that long sequence.
See where Twenty-Second Founding occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.