The world of Mandalore has a long and complicated history in Star Wars, and perhaps even more complicated than the story of its peoples’ wars among themselves are their wars united against a common foe: the Galactic Republic, and the Jedi Order that served it. But outside of allusions and artwork, the story of what defined these conflicts has gone largely untouched in contemporary Star Wars continuity, as the focus returned to Mandalore’s restoration in the post-Imperial era. In the former canon of the Expanded Universe, however, the Mandalorians carved a defining path across the galaxy—in a series of wars that would reshape the Jedi and the Old Republic forever.
The Forging of Mandalore
The story of the Mandalorian Crusades is defined, in part, by the creation of the Mandalorian people. In the EU, the Mandalorians’ roots lay with a species called the Taung: humanoid simians originally indigenous to Coruscant, they were routed from their homeworld after conflict with the planet’s other native civilization, the Zhell. The Taung eventually relocated to the world that would become christened as Mandalore for their leader, Mandalore the First, adopting their new name as the Mandalorians, the sons and daughters of Mandalore in the Taung tongue.
Almost immediately after the establishment of Mandalore, the Mandalorians dispatched warriors on nomadic crusades to subjugate nearby worlds and expand Mandalorian influence. Over three thousand years, generations of Mandalorian crusades pushed from the Outer Rim into the fringes of the Republic, establishing a growing pocket of Mandalorian space.
The Crusades and the Great Shadow
But things would change under the leadership of Mandalore the Indomitable. Driven by a religious experience on the world of Shogun, Mandalore the Indomitable elevated conflict itself as a divine pillar of Mandalorian society. Under the Indomitable’s rule, Mandalorian aggression became a serious galactic threat as the crusades thrust deeper and deeper into the galactic Core, with Mandalorian space eventually encompassing worlds practically on the doorstep of the Taung’s ancestral home of Coruscant by 4000 BBY, 3 millennia after Mandalore’s establishment.
Hoping to exploit a fragile political situation in the Empress Teta system, which itself had been locked into civil wars and interventionist conflicts with Republic-backed forces amid the rise of a Dark Side cult known as the Krath, Mandalore the Indomitable led a new crusade into Tetan space. The crusaders’ raiding drew the attention of Ulic Qel-Droma, a fallen Jedi who had been coaxed to the Dark Side while trying to infiltrate the Krath, who challenged Mandalore the Indomitable to a duel in 3996 BBY, with the seven worlds of the Empress Teta system, and the military might of the Krath and Mandalorian forces, at stake.
Mandalore the Indomitable lost. Spared by Qel-Droma to deny him an honorable death, Qel-Droma leveraged victory to bring the Mandalorians into his service through Mandalore the Indomitable’s sway. With the Mandalorians on their side, Qel-Droma and his fellow warlord, the Sith Lord Exar Kun, were prepared to launch a new Sith Empire—and with it, plunge the galaxy into total war.
The Great Sith War would last just a single year, even with the powerful aid of the Mandalorians. The Indomitable and his Crusaders were largely absent from the turning point in the conflict at Ossus, where a defeated Qel-Droma was severed from the Force after slaying his own brother and surrendered to the Jedi and Republic—instead, Qel-Droma had tasked the Mandalorians with an invasion of Onderon. Locked into a slow stalemate with the locals, the arrival of Republic reinforcements over the world eventually pushed Mandalore into calling for a retreat to one of the Onderonian moons, Dxun. But the Indomitable was shot down en route and forced to land in the moon’s jungles, where he was devoured by beasts.
Mandalore the Ultimate and the Neo-Crusaders
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