Overview of Galactic Chronology
The dates below are given in the Coruscant Reckoning Calendar, the system of chronology used on the planet Coruscant and later adapted by the Old Republic for widespread galactic use. The Republic and later Imperial Bureau of Standards Synchronization Department maintained a permanent think-tank and computational bank which was responsible for the quantum calculations that enabled timekeeping across interstellar distances to remain consistent.
The zero year of the Coruscant Reckoning Calendar corresponds to the traditional date for the foundation of the City of Coruscant, which is still celebrated with planetwide fĆŖtes as Founding Day. The planet now known as Coruscant was originally named Had Abbadon; in the Third Millennium, it came to be metonymically referred to by the name of its largest (and eventually, only) city, a convention that was later formalized. The earliest written records of ancient Abbadonean civilization date back to the beginnings of the planetās bronze age around -5000 CRC, nearly 13,000 years before the Battle of Yavin.
Pre-2942 CRC: Galactic Antiquity
All time before the widespread development of the hyperdrive is known as Galactic Antiquity. Dating the advent of the hyperdrive is problematic, and the question is the subject of scholarly debate; the overwhelming consensus among historians is that the hyperdrive was invented independently by numerous species and civilizations over the course of the Third Millennium, though some species, such as humans and Jawas, seem to have appeared independently on multiple planets prior to this period by a method of colonization unknown. Hypotheses that early human civilizations originated on Coruscant and explored the galaxy in sublight-speed āsleeper shipsā equipped with advanced cryonics technology were supported by the Imperial Ministry of Enlightenment under Emperor Palpatine, but are otherwise not widely accepted. The Late Antiquity Period saw the Rakatan invasions sweep several worlds in the Core, including Corellia and Chandrila. The Rakata, regarded by historians as the first species to engage in conquest on an interstellar scale, were ruled by a Force-sensitive priestly caste that demanded total subservience from its citizens. As the Rakatan Empire advanced into the Mid Rim, they were contested by the Jedi Order of Jedha, who ultimately led a revolution that toppled the Rakatan hegemony. After it was reverse-engineered by Corellian scientists, the Rakatan model of the hyperdrive became the most widely used in the galaxy for the next thousand years. The end of Galactic Antiquity is generally considered to have occurred in 2942 CRC, when the now-legendary Centerpoint Expedition successfully mapped the Corellian Run, one of the most important galactic hyperlanes, connecting the Core to the Outer Rim for the first time.
2942 - 3855 CRC: The Warring Systems Period
As hyperdrive technology became ubiquitous across the galaxy, the various interstellar civilizations naturally came into territorial and economic conflict. This relatively brief but extremely bloody time is known as the Warring Systems Period, and is traditionally characterized by military aggression and xenophobia. However, it was also a period of rapid technological, economic, and cultural growth for the galaxy. The Jedi Order, fresh from the defeat of the Rakata, established themselves as a martial class in the service of the House of Yojou, the ruling family of a feudal-imperialist polity capitalled on the planet Reiāizu. In Coruscant, the early Warring Systems Period was defined by the rule of the Carvi dynasty, which was toppled in 3824 CRC when the planet was conquered by the Empire of Reiāizu, backed by the Jedi knights. The relocation of the imperial throne from Reiāizu to Coruscant two decades later is the traditionally cited end date of the Warring Systems Period.
3855 - 5024 CRC: The Feudal Era
Under the Reiāizu Empire, the Jedi Orderās monastic roots were largely forgotten except on Jedha itself. Instead, the Jedi knights served as a professional class of military retainers, sworn to the service of the various lords of the Empire. The greatest battles of the Jedi Order in the early Feudal Era were against the Mandalorians, a multispecies culture united by a common adherence to the Creed of Mandalore, a warrior religion that originated on the planet of the same name in the Mid Rim. The Mandalorians had long warred amongst themselves, but were united in 3899 when Tarre Vizsla, a Mandalorian warrior who had trained with (and been expelled from) the Jedi Order, was acclaimed the Mandalore, supreme warmaster of the faithful, by the Covenant of Armorers. The 3912 Sack of Jedha by Mandalorian forces under Vizsla (who would later become known as Mandalore the Great to distinguish him from his successors, all of whom took the name and title of Mandalore) was the first of innumerable conflicts between the Jedi Order and the Mandalorians, an enmity that persisted into the time of the Galactic Republic.
The decline of the Reiāizu Empire was a result of multiple cascading factors. By the mid-Fifth Millennium, though the Reiāizu Emperor nominally remained the head of a galaxy-spanning hegemony, in actual practice the various imperial vassals controlled their fiefdoms with almost total autonomy and warfare between them was commonplace. The latter half of the Feudal Period saw the Great Schism of the Jedi, which crystallized in the events of the Sith Rebellions in 4987 CRC. After the defeat of these rebellions, the Imperial House of Reiāizu took steps to reassert its authority over its territories. The Crown Prince Benkan Yojou ascended the throne at the age of twenty early in the rebellions, after his father was murdered by what was claimed to be Sith assassins, and personally led the imperial forces at several key battles. Beloved by his troops, the dynamic young emperor used the crisis to revitalize the ailing central government. However, Benkanās renewal of imperial central power was not to last. His death from illness in 5024 marks the end of the unified rule of the House of Yojou, which had governed the galaxy in for twelve hundred years. Benkanās sons fell to infighting, and the imperial territories split into numerous warring powers.
5024 - 6800 CRC: The Galactic Dark Age
The period between the fall of the Reiāizu Empire and the advent of the Galactic Republic is known as the Galactic Dark Age. Like the Warring Systems Period before it, the Dark Age was characterized by regional conflict between warlords, raiders, and petty kings such as Xim the Despot, whose defeat at the Third Battle of Vontor in 5065 led to the rise of the Hutt Dynasties in the Outer Rim. The Hutts, who had fled their original homeworld of Varl sometime in the late Feudal Era, colonized the swamp world of Evocar, which they rechristened Nal Hutta, āglorious jewelā in Huttese, after enslaving the native Evocii. The expansive policies of the Hutt dynasts, as well as other realms such as Mandalore and Alderaan, did not go uncontested; most notably, the Corellian League, a network of merchant guilds operating on multiple planets throughout the modern-day Corellian Sector, was established in 6633 and became the primary military and economic adversary to the Kingdom of Alderaan, with which it contested dominance over the Core Systems. The first half of the Galactic Dark Age also saw the rediscovery of the Sith in 5130, when hyperlane scouts exploring the Unknown Regions stumbled upon the planet Ziost, the capital of an empire forged through conquest by Sith warriors who had fled there at the end of the Sith Rebellions. These Sith invaded the galaxy and were confronted by the Jedi Order in a conflict known as the Great Hyperspace War, which ended in 5139 at the Battle of Korriban. Following the end of the Great Hyperspace War, the Jedi Order withdrew from galactic affairs and sequestered itself on Jedha; this period of the Orderās history is known as the Great Cloister. Only a few Jedi temples remained in existence outside of Jedha itself, most prominently on Alderaan, where the Order retained a special privilege as spiritual advisors to the Monarchy. Though the Jedi occasionally ventured out of Jedha to root out and destroy Sith lords, who continued to emerge sporadically throughout the Dark Age, the Great Cloister officially lasted until 6771, when Rune Calonym, a Jedi knight, left Jedha with a group of followers on a mission to liberate Hutt Space. Calonymās victories over the Hutts led to the terminal decline of their empire and the creation of the Jedi Protectorate, a union of free planets governed by Jedi knights, with Calonym as Lord Protector. However, he remained at odds with the Jedha orthodoxy, who excommunicated him in 6774 after his victory at the Battle of Nar Shaddaa. The Protectorate and the mainline Jedi Order would be reconciled, however, in 6783, when they both intervened on behalf of the Corellian League in a conflict against the Kingdom of Alderaan and its Lord Marshal, Joren Tallek, a rogue Jedi knight. Rune Calonymās excommunication was lifted in the aftermath of the victory over Tallekās forces, and in 6798 the Lord Protector invited the major galactic powers to Coruscant for a diplomatic conclave overseen by the Jedi Order. Over the course of these negotiations, it was decided that the free planets of the galaxy should unite under a single intergovernmental body that would legislate, arbitrate, and provide collective security for its member worlds. After a further year of negotiation, at the turn of the century 6800 the Constitution of the Galactic Republic was ratified, bringing the Galactic Dark Age to a close.
6800 - 7942 CRC: The Old Republic
Modern historians generally consider the rule of the Old Republic to be the high point of galactic civilization, when the rule of law was universally promulgated and the violence and tyranny of ages past curtailed. Others criticize the Republicās reliance on a bloated bureaucracy intended to support the dominance of Core World plutocrats as having led inevitably to the rise of the Galactic Empire. The first great constitutional crisis of the Republic was the Contispex Crusades of the early Eighth Millennium. The House of Contispex, a Coruscanti noble family, produced several Chancellors of the Republic during the Seventieth Century, and were infamous for their fundamentalist adherence to the ideology of āHuman High Cultureā, the primary tenets of which were humanocentrism, xenophobia, and the veneration of the patriarchal family structure. The prominence of Human High Culturalism under the chancellorships of the Contispex dynasty gave rise to a series of proscriptions and military actions that nearly tore the nascent Republic apart. Eventually, the Contispex dynasty was overthrown in 7091 thanks to the efforts of Biel Ductavis, Grandmaster of the Jedi, who afterward became the first person to serve both in that office and the Chancellorship. Ductavis ushered in the High Republic era, the zenith of Republic glory.
The High Republic period took place over what historians call āthe short Eighth Millenniumā from the 7100s to the 7700s. This six-hundred year period saw the development of new technologies, such as the compound bacta, a miraculous healing drug produced on the planet Thyferra. During this time, Republic space experienced an unprecedented era of peace and economic prosperity, broken only by the Mandalorian Wars of 7453-7530, in which the Jedi Order defeated the Mandalorian armies and forced a planetwide disarmament. Meanwhile, the legacy of the Contispex-era xenophobia remained ensconced in the Coreward halls of power, especially on planets such as Coruscant and Chandrila. The High Republic period came to an end in 7745, when marauders from the galactic frontier began to invade Republic space in vast numbers. Though the Jedi eventually repulsed these marauders at the 7749 Battle of Eriadu, the attacks had eroded public confidence in the Republic government, triggering a slow decline that culminated in the outbreak of the Clone Wars in 7939.
The Clone Wars were orchestrated by Chancellor Palpatine, an elder statesman of the Republic who was in secret the last of the Sith Lords. Acting through his apprentice, the Jedi recusant Count Dooku, Palpatine inflamed tensions between the federal government on Coruscant and systems dissatisfied with Republic rule. When a number of these systems, represented by Dooku, announced their intention to leave the Republic, Palpatine used the emergency powers granted him by the Constitution to order the creation of a clone army to quell the Separatist revolt. By the warās end, Palpatineās emergency powers and his term of office had been vastly expanded, and after engineering Dookuās death at the hands of the Jedi Anakin Skywalker, Palpatine declared that the Jedi Order was plotting to take control of the Republic. Skywalker, now Palpatineās apprentice under the name of Darth Vader, led a purge of the Jedi that all but destroyed the Order. A subsequent Senate resolution extended Palpatineās emergency powers for life and accorded him the title of āEmperorā, bringing an end to nearly a thousand years of democratic rule in the galaxy.
7942 - 7981: Reign of the Empire
Though the Galactic Empire under Palpatine ruled the galaxy for less than forty years, it was a time of rapid societal change in the galaxy. Imperial policy was characterized by increased military buildup across all galactic sectors, suppression of the Emperorās critics and political opponents, the promotion of Human High Culture and the corresponding disenfranchisement and, in some cases, enslavement of nonhuman species, and the erosion of the legislative powers of the Senate in favor of a dictatorial executive.
The early years of the Empire were devoted to what the propagandists termed āthe Reconquest of the Rimā, a series of military campaigns spearheaded by the newly-formed legions of the Stormtrooper Corps, the goal of which was to pacify Separatists holdouts and eradicate piracy in the Outer Rim Territories. Revolutionary activity was never completely quashed, however, in spite of the best efforts of the Imperial Security Bureau, the Emperorās secret police. Several disparate rebel movements eventually coalesced into the Alliance to Restore the Republic, an organized group of guerillas based on the planet Yavin IV. The Alliance was led, at first covertly and then openly, by Mon Mothma of Chandrila, who left her position as her planetās senator and went into hiding after publicly denouncing Palpatineās role in the Ghorman Massacre of 7975. Two years later, in 7977, Palpatine officially dissolved the Galactic Senate. Concurrent to the dissolution of the Senate, rebel spaceships, striking from their hidden base, won their first victory against Imperial forces at the Battle of Scarif. During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empireās ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Though the Death Star was destroyed at the Battle of Yavin thanks to the heroism of the rebel pilots Luke Skywalker (son of Anakin Skywalker) and Han Solo, the Rebellion was unable to prevent the destruction of Alderaan, home to Alliance co-founder Bail Organa and his adopted daughter, the Princess Leia. Galvanized by the victory at Yavin, in 7981 the Alliance won a decisive triumph at the Battle of Endor, resulting in the deaths of Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader. The decapitated Imperial military collapsed into a number of mutually-hostile rump states, and a New Republic was established on Chandrila, with Mon Mothma elected as its first chancellor.
7981 - Present: The New Republic
The new government faced immediate challenges to its claims of continuity with the Republic of old. Coruscant remained under the control of the Imperial Security Bureau, which seized control of the apparatus of government and instituted martial law, while the various regional warlords collectively known as the Imperial Remnant engaged the provisional New Republic government on multiple fronts. The New Republic Senate initiated a policy of de-Imperialization, beginning with the Amnesty Act of 7982, which was intended to ensure smooth transition of government by providing an avenue for former Imperial governmental employees to retain or re-earn their positions. Anti-Imperial elements in the Galactic Senate, including Princess Leia Organa-Solo, objected to the Amnesty Actās inclusion of provisions for the re-integration and re-instatement of Imperial military personnel; proponents of this element of the act contended that the worst of the Imperial militaryās atrocities were committed primarily by the Stormtroopers Corps, members of which were explicitly excluded from the legislationās language, and that a robust Republic military was necessary to combat both Imperial warlords as well as piracy in the Outer Rim. Princess Leia was largely forced out of government following a political scandal in 7983, when it was publicly revealed that her birth father had been none other than the Emperorās right hand, Darth Vader. Meanwhile, the Jedi Order has been reformed under the leadership of Luke Skywalker. In a show of solidarity with his sister, however, he has insisted that his new Jedi not become an official organ of the New Republic government. Present-day Republic politics are defined by the contention between two principal parties: the Centralists, who favor a strong central galactic government, and the Devolutionists, who advocate for the prioritization of and devolvement of powers to the governments of the Republicās individual member systems. This debate, stemming from the desire not to repeat the mistakes of the Old Republic, coupled with continued aggression from Imperial remnants and the loss of traditional Republic territories to sectorist elements, puts the fledgling government in a precarious position. Time will tell if the New Republic will be able to hold the galaxy together.
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