The Original History Behind the Mandalorians’ Wars Against the Jedi

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

The Mandalorian people found themselves on a precipice. The Great Sith War had greatly diminished the Mandalorian population, still then descended from the Taung that had founded their world three thousand years prior. The Mandalorian who found the Indomitable’s mask and rose to prominence as the next Mandalore—eventually to be known as Mandalore the Ultimate. Not only reuniting the remnant clans after establishing his forward base on Dxun as a training ground for Mandalorian warriors, Mandalore the Ultimate, himself a Taung, began the process of opening up Mandalorian society, recruiting members from a swathe of other species who submitted to their code of honor. He also instituted a policy of the Mandalorians occupying and adding worlds to Mandalore’s growing rule, rather than just simply pillaging them, creating a backbone of worlds that could support a war industry.

Over 20 years, Mandalore the Ultimate bided time restrengthening his people, just as the Jedi and Republic restored the damage wrought during the Great Sith War. Ultimately influenced in part into open conflict with the Republic by an emissary operating on behalf of Vitiate’s hidden Sith Empire, but equally driven by his own desire to test both the Republic’s and the renewed Mandalorians’ strengths, Mandalore called his Neo-Crusaders into a new crusade in 3976 BBY. But Mandalore’s forces did not immediately leap into battle within the galactic Core: the Mandalorians spent years picking at territories in the Outer Rim on the fringes of the Republic, taking worlds and exterminating millions, but just far enough away from the Republic to not provoke a response from the Senate.

It took Mandalorian encroachment near the world of Taris, an Outer Rim world that had become a crucial hub of trade in the Republic’s re-expansion after the Great Sith War, for the Republic to take notice. Shoring up defenses and engaging in skirmishes with Neo-Crusader forces around Taris and its local systems, the Republic and the Mandalorians spent a year engaging in a false war before Mandalore the Ultimate began the conflict in earnest in 3964 BBY. In what became known as “The Onslaught,” Mandalorian forces broke through Republic defense lines, besieging the mining world of Vanquo as well as Taris itself, as the Mandalorians launched devastating and brutal attacks on worlds like Onderon and Serroco.

But throughout the false war, another important conflict had been within the Republic itself. A young Jedi began making waves in the order, advocating for Jedi intervention on a galactic scale to stop the conflict with the Mandalorians from breaking out into a full-on war. Adopting revanchism—retaking territory taken by the Mandalorians—the young Jedi eventually established their own movement within the Order, swaying more and more Jedi to their beliefs at the behest of the Grand Council, which continued to rule that the Jedi had no place in the Republic’s military plans.

Although the council would dispatch the Revanchists on missions during the early phases of the war, and the Republic itself increasingly wrapped itself up in interest over the rise of a Jedi crusader who was willing to fight the Mandalorians, eventually the Revanchists and their leader would break entirely from the Jedi Council on the planet Cathar. An Outer Rim world outside of Republic space, Cathar had been one of the earliest worlds in the region invaded by Mandalore the Ultimate’s forces, leading to the near-extinction of the Cathar people. Prompted to investigate the devastation of the world, the Revanchists discovered through the Force the truth of the Mandalorian’s extermination of the Cathar—with their leader, now taking the mantle of Revan, swearing to fight until the Mandalorians were defeated.

The discovery of the Cathar genocide begrudgingly prompted the Jedi Council to approve Revan and their followers’ formal support of the Republic Military. First acting as Mercy Corps, an ostensible division of support crew and healers, the Revanchists quickly became key generals and frontline warriors in the war. Even as the Mandalorians began to push deeper and deeper coreward, the Revanchist Jedi’s intervention would help turn the tide in the Republic’s favor, with Revan ultimately being named Supreme Commander of the Republic Military by 3962.

After years of pushing the Mandalorians further back into their own space, Revan drew the Mandalorians into a major conflict over the world of Malachor V. While Revan duelled and slew Malachore the Ultimate aboard the Mandalorian flagship, Revanchist forces activated an experimental superweapon known as the Mass Shadow Generator, a gravitational vortex generator. Trapping Republic and Mandalorian vessels alike and slamming them into the surface of the world below them, the Mass Shadow Generator brought Malachor V to a horrific cataclysm, sundering the planet and killing tens of thousands.

Aftermath

With the death of Mandalore the Ultimate—and Revan’s hiding of the mask of Mandalore, denying the Mandalorian people the traditional path to a new unifying leader—and the sheer loss of life at Malachor V, the last of the great Mandalorian Crusades came to an end with the surviving Mandalorians offering unconditional surrender to the Republic. Revan ordered that the Mandalorians be stripped of their weapons, armor, and military hardware, a tactic, combined with the disappearance of Mandalore’s mask, that fractured the Mandalorian clans into fringe groups fighting among themselves for power, scattering across the galaxy.

It would take years for Mandalore’s mask to be found, leading to the age of a new Mandalore, the Preserver, who would in time work with Jedi and Republic forces alike to battle the threat of the Sith in the decade after the end of the Mandalorian Wars. But Revan’s victory at Malachor V set the stage for an equally devastating conflict to come: defying the rules of the Jedi Council to return to Coruscant for their role in the horrific loss of life at Malachor, Revan and his close ally Malak took the bulk of the Revanchist Jedi into the Unknown Regions, following clues given to Revan by Mandalore the Ultimate in his dying breaths. Finding there the hidden Sith Empire that had likewise helped push the Mandalorians to attack the Republic in the first place, Revan and Malak were corrupted and broken into submitting to the Dark Side themselves… setting the stage for their command of an invasion of the galaxy by the Sith once more.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.