Event · M31

Ullanor Crusade

The Ullanor Crusade was a Great Crusade campaign that destroyed a vast Ork empire in the Ullanor sector, culminating around 000.M31. The empire, ruled by the warlord Urlakk Urg, had grown to a scale that rivalled the largest greenskin hosts recorded during the Great Crusade, and its presence so close to the wars of galactic reunification made it a target the Emperor of Mankind chose to confront in person rather than delegate to a single Legion. The assault on Ullanor was accordingly mounted as one of the largest single musters of the Great Crusade, drawing the Luna Wolves, the Ultramarines and the White Scars, together with elements of other Space Marine Legions, the Imperial Army and the Emperor’s own retinue. Horus Lupercal, at that time primarch of the Luna Wolves, held overall field command of the assembled host. Across the wider sector the fighting is recorded as prolonged and costly, a grinding reduction of fortified Ork holdings consistent with the sheer numbers the greenskins were able to field, though detailed accounts of individual engagements on the outer worlds have not survived into later Imperial record with the same clarity as the campaign’s outcome. The decisive action came at Ullanor Prime, the capital world of Urlakk Urg’s empire. While allied Legions drew off much of the Ork strength across the system, Horus led the Luna Wolves in a direct strike at Urg’s fortress, breaching its defences and fighting up to the warlord’s own chamber alongside First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon and a detachment of Terminators. Horus is recorded as having defeated Urg in personal combat, and with their overlord slain the Ork empire’s cohesion collapsed, allowing Imperial forces to secure the sector. Victory at Ullanor was marked by the Triumph of Ullanor, a ceremony on the conquered world at which the Emperor named Horus Warmaster, granting him supreme command of the Imperial military and its ongoing crusade of conquest, and at which the Luna Wolves took the new name of Sons of Horus. It was the last such triumph the Emperor presided over in person; soon afterwards he withdrew from the crusading fleets to Terra to pursue his webway project, leaving Horus as effective head of the Great Crusade. Later tradition holds that this elevation, made at the height of Imperial confidence, set the conditions from which Horus’s subsequent turn to treachery and the Horus Heresy would emerge, making Ullanor one of the pivotal hinge-points of the crusade era despite being, in itself, a victory. Ullanor’s contemporaries in this period include the primarchs and Legions gathered for the muster and the Triumph that followed, several of them later central to the Heresy on both sides of that conflict, and its aftermath is inseparable from the Emperor’s departure for Terra and the beginning of Horus’s ascendancy as Warmaster. The world’s later history is recorded as no less troubled: the Ork warlord known as the Beast is recorded as having made Ullanor his own capital during the War of the Beast, renaming it Gorkogrod, and the primarch Vulkan died fighting there before the Adeptus Mechanicus is recorded as having secretly relocated the ruined world rather than destroy it outright. Ullanor’s name endured chiefly through the Triumph, remembered less for the Ork empire it once held than for the ceremony that followed its fall.

See where Ullanor Crusade occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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