“For a over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic,” Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker in A New Hope. In the decades of Star Wars storytelling since, countless tales have fleshed out that connection between the Galactic Republic and the Jedi Order’s service of it, from its highest highs to the lows that tore them both apart in the fires of the Empire’s rise.
But while a thousand generations span much of the unseen ancient history of Star Wars well beyond the circumstances we find the Republic and the Jedi in by the time of the prequels, the status quo introduced in those films—where the Republic and the Jedi are enmeshed akin to separations of church and state in our own world—is not quite so ancient.
In both current Star Wars continuity and (much more extensively) in its former expanded universe material, the transition between the long history of the Old Republic—the ancient entity that had shaped the galaxy for tens of thousands of years, often locked into conflict with resurgent Sith Empires—and our understanding of the “modern” Republic comes approximately 1,000 years before the events of the Skywalker Saga. And they are both defined by the same name: the Ruusan Reformations.
In contemporary Star Wars canon, little is known about the specifics of the reformations, beyond the fact it was a series of legislative packages that significantly curtailed the power of the office of the Republic’s Supreme Chancellor—a level of power that would not be granted to that office again until the Clone War. But in the Expanded Universe, the Ruusan Reformations represent a transformative moment in galactic history: a moment that did not just reshape the Republic, but forever changed the Jedi Order’s place in it.
The Dark Age
The period of time prior to the Ruusan Reformations was one of existential crisis for the Galactic Republic. For a thousand years, the galaxy had once again been thrust into a cataclysmic conflict between the Republic and a resurrected Sith Empire, established by Darth Ruin during the fourth Great Schism between the Jedi and the Sith.
The New Sith Wars, as they would come to be known, were a series of interstellar campaigns that radically reshaped the power balance of the galaxy. The Sith Empire surged dramatically in power with its re-establishment, taking over swaths of the galaxy as the Republic was beaten back to the brink of extinction multiple times. Thousands upon thousands of Republic member worlds were abandoned to the Sith as the Republic retreated further and further towards the galactic core, and in doing so, the economic and industrial systems that had supported its vast expansion crumbled, as corruption and lawlessness broke down the fabric of galactic civilization.
The final century of the New Sith Wars were known in particular as the Dark Age of the Republic. Beyond the impact the Sith Empire’s upper hand had on its structure as its size and scope was drastically reduced, the Republic was heavily diminished through layers of political and industrial corruption and outbreaks of disease, as well as a breakdown of key logistical systems like the HoloNet, rendering the vast majority of real-time galactic communication impossible, and the deactivation of hyperspace lanes to the Outer Rim.
But there was another significant issue: as a leading faction in the war against the Sith, the Jedi Order itself had increasingly assumed much of the legislative and military branches of the Republic. Jedi served as Supreme Chancellors with sweeping political power, or banded together to form governmental bodies and defense forces across individual sectors of space. Even the Republic’s own standing armies and navies came more and more under the direct control of the Jedi, effectively making the order the de facto galactic power against the Sith Empire.
By the last decade of the Dark Age, the Sith themselves had similarly diminished, fracturing over a series of internal feuds and civil wars, before the Sith Lord Skere Kaan, a fallen Jedi Master, reforged the remaining Sith into the Brotherhood of Darkness. Launching another war against the weakened Jedi and Republic, the Brotherhood was eventually beaten back into a years-long series of engagements on the planet Ruusan.
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