Event · M40–M41
Twenty-Sixth Founding
The Twenty-Sixth Founding is one of the numbered Foundings by which the Adeptus Terra has raised new Chapters of Space Marines. It stands in the long line of such acts stretching back to the Second Founding, which divided the Legiones Astartes into Chapters after the Horus Heresy, and forward to the Ultima Founding that would follow under Roboute Guilliman. Terra is the anchor for every Founding, since the High Lords who sit there, together with the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Adeptus Astartes itself, hold the authority to sanction the creation of a new Chapter and the gene-seed lineage it will carry. The Twenty-Sixth Founding falls late in the Imperium’s history, in the period immediately before the Primaris Foundings reshaped the Adeptus Astartes. Its course follows the pattern set by every Founding conducted under the Codex Astartes: a demand for fresh Chapters, drawn from Terra’s assessment of losses and strategic need, met by cultivating gene-seed from an established progenitor line and dispatching newly raised battle-brothers, under Mechanicus oversight, to a designated Chapter world. As with several Foundings of this era, the surviving record names no single campaign or commander as its cause, and accounts differ on exactly which Chapters owe their origin to this act rather than to the Foundings immediately before or after it. Orrery attributes no specific battle honours to the Twenty-Sixth Founding itself, in keeping with the Imperium’s uneven record-keeping and the tendency of Chapters to guard their own origins. What is recorded is its place in the sequence: a Founding late enough to sit close to the crises that would soon prompt the Ultima Founding’s far larger expansion, yet still bound to the older, thousand-strong Chapter model rather than the Primaris reforms to come. Any Chapter tracing its lineage to the Twenty-Sixth Founding remains answerable to the Adeptus Astartes and, through it, to Terra as the seat from which every Founding is authorised. It is remembered less for a deed of its own than as one more link connecting the Second Founding’s division of the Legions to the present era’s continuing need to replenish the Emperor’s armies.
See where Twenty-Sixth Founding occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.