Macragge

Macragge is a mountain world in the Ultramar sector, the capital of the Five Hundred Worlds and homeworld of the Ultramarines Chapter. Its principal fortress-city, the Fortress of Hera, sits within a mountain range and serves as the administrative and military seat from which the primarch Roboute Guilliman and, later, the Chapter Master govern Ultramar. The planet is the largest and most populous world of the Macragge System, and its name is given both to the wider Ultramar sector and to the primarch’s own flagship, Macragge’s Honour.

Guilliman found Macragge already sustaining a functioning, war-torn civilisation when he was discovered on the planet during the Great Crusade; he unified its warring city-states before the Emperor’s expedition fleets arrived, and it became the recruiting ground and capital from which the Ultramarines Legion, and afterwards Chapter, drew its strength. Following the primarch’s presumed death and the chaos of the Horus Heresy, Macragge briefly anchored Imperium Secundus, a shadow-Imperium proclaimed jointly by Guilliman, Sanguinius and the Lion in the belief that the Emperor and Terra were lost.

In 745.M41 Hive Fleet Behemoth descended on Macragge in what became known as the Battle for Macragge; Chapter Master Marneus Calgar, Captain Uriel Ventris and the Ultramarines, aided by allied Imperial forces, broke the tendril at severe cost before its destruction in the planet’s skies. At the close of the 41st millennium the world again became a focal point of galactic events when the tech-priest Belisarius Cawl, working through the Ultramarines and with the Eldar seer Yvraine among those drawn into the unfolding crisis, achieved the revival of Guilliman from ten millennia of stasis.

Macragge remains held by Calgar and Captain Cato Sicarius, its garrison the core of the Five Hundred Worlds’ defence. Guilliman’s awakening on the planet set in motion the Indomitus Crusade, binding Macragge in the same sequence of events to Baal, defended from Hive Fleet Leviathan, to the fortress world Vigilus, and to Terra itself, where the primarch was named Imperial Regent.