Lord Solar Macharius

The Crusade

Lord Solar Macharius was an Imperial Guard general who, in 392.M41, conceived an offensive ambition no Imperial commander had attempted in centuries: a sustained military campaign aimed at adding new worlds to the Imperium on the same operational scale the Great Crusade had used. He gathered an army. He persuaded the Senatorum Imperialis to grant him the Lord Solar title — the highest Astra Militarum field rank, last conferred during the Heresy. He marched.

In seven years he brought nearly a thousand worlds back into Imperial Compliance. The campaign was the largest sustained Imperial military expansion since M31.

Were there but one more world to conquer, I would weep.

— Macharius, attributed late Crusade

The End

In 399.M41 Macharius reached the edge of what his commanders considered prudent. His own logistics had outrun his administrative ability to consolidate. His generals — by then commanding individual sub-sectors of the Crusade — refused to march further into the unknown.

Macharius accepted the refusal. He retired to a quiet sector. He died, by every account, of grief. The cause was officially "unrecorded malady." The Imperium considered the grief diagnosis embarrassing but not incorrect.

The Successor Wars

Macharius's Crusade did not produce a stable succession. His seven senior generals fought each other for control of the conquered worlds — the so-called Macharian Heresy that consumed the next half-century. Most of the worlds Macharius added fell away or were degraded by the time the succession stabilised. The Imperium retained perhaps half.

The Crusade is taught at every Imperial Schola Progenium as both an inspiration and a warning.

Legacy

Macharius was canonised as a Saint by the Ecclesiarchy in the centuries after his death. Imperial Guard regiments raised in the centuries since carry his name and his banner. The Imperial War Office considers him the most successful conventional general of the late M41 and the second-most-important non-primarch Imperial commander of recorded history (after Yarrick, by the Astra Militarum reckoning).