The Prequel era is one of our favorite chapters
of Star Wars lore, as we’re sure you can tell from all the videos we’ve made about it. For
the most part, though, we tend to focus on one particular chapter of the Prequel era, the
Clone Wars. The Clone Wars are probably the most interesting and fleshed-out part of this period
- but there’s more to the Prequel era than just the Clone Wars. In fact, there’s a whole bunch
of great lore set in the decades right before The Phantom Menace, and since this month marks
that film’s 25th anniversary, we figured we’d give you a rundown of this chapter of galactic
history before you go and rewatch the film. The events of The Phantom Menace marked the
beginning of the end of the Great Peace of the Republic, a thousand-year-long chapter of
galactic history that began with the Ruusan Reformation of 1000 BBY. Following the defeat
of the Sith in the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, the Republic rebuilt, reorganized many aspects
of its government, and entered a golden age, which lasted for centuries. Following the apparent
death of Darth Bane, the sole Sith survivor of the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, the Sith were believed
to be extinct, allowing the Jedi Order to devote itself entirely to protecting the Republic. And
with no major enemies left on the galactic stage, the Republic thrived, sharing its golden age
with most of the known galaxy. With the Ruusan Reformation, the Republic’s armies were dissolved,
and Supreme Chancellor Tarsus Valorum proclaimed that the Republic would never see full-scale
war again. That promise held for centuries, and though there were small-scale wars
throughout the Great Peace of the Republic, for the most part this was an era of
unprecedented stability for the galaxy. Of course, that doesn’t mean everything was
perfect. The Golden Age of the Republic was also a golden age for the Hutt Cartel, which reached
its largest de facto territorial extent during this period, establishing effective control
over numerous Republic sectors, as well as many worlds that lay beyond the Republic’s
borders, such as Tatooine. And while the dissolution of the Republic Military in favor of
the smaller, rapid-response Judicial Forces fleet and a sector-based network of Planetary Security
Forces initially granted sectors greater autonomy in their own defense, as the centuries wore on
the PSFs of the poorer sectors became outdated and undermanned, leading to rampant crises of
piracy in the Outer Rim. Megacorporations like the Trade Federation, which formed in 312 BBY, took
advantage of this to increase their influence, promising Rimworlds the protection of their Trade
Defense Force in exchange for their allegiance. As a result, towards the end of the Great Peace
of the Republic, things began to slip a bit, especially in newly-explored parts of the Outer
Rim. Hoping to resolve this by incentivizing economic growth in the region, the Senate declared
the whole Mid ahd Outer Rims a Free Trade Zone, meaning that companies like the Trade
Federation could operate there tax-free. This measure was successful in getting
corporations to set up in the Outer Rim, but it also ended up causing problems of its
own, making the Republic’s megacorporations far too powerful. They established mini-empires
out in the Rim, building up private armies under the guise of security forces and leveraging their
economic power to be granted full representation in the Senate. The increased power of the
Republic’s corporate factions led to a steady increase in corruption and gridlock in the
Senate, and by the Republic’s final century it was becoming increasingly dysfunctional and
beholden to the Trade Federation and its allies. On-screen, we have a map of the Republic from
67-32 BBY, the period of time we’ll be covering in this video. In this period, the Great Peace of
the Republic was in its final decades, as turmoil intensified across the Republic and several
wealthy factions started to consolidate their power. The Force became increasingly shrouded
in darkness, to the concern of the Jedi Order, and the scourge of piracy was at an all-time
high in the Outer Rim. Unbeknownst to anyone, many of these problems had the same source; they
were the products of Sith manipulation. At this point in time, it was known only to a few, but
the last known Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Bane, had not been killed when the Jedi believed,
and he had trained an apprentice, Darth Zannah, who continued her master’s Sith Grand Plan, a
plot to conquer the Republic from within. Thus, the Order of the Sith Lords had survived for
centuries, manipulating events from the shadows, operating with only two members at a time, a
master and an apprentice. The master would teach the apprentice the ways of the Sith, and when
the apprentice became strong enough, they would kill the master, take their place, and repeat
the cycle anew. As our story begins in 67 BBY, this cycle was playing out yet again on
the gloomy, little-known planet Bal’demnic. Bal’demnic, unbeknownst to most of the galaxy,
was a rich source of lightsaber-resistant cortosis. This was what had attracted Darth
Tenebrous and Darth Plagueis to the planet, where shell companies that they owned had
begun mining operations. In their day-to-day guises as legendary starship designer Rugess
Nome and Banking Clan magistrate Hego Damask, they had come for a tour of the mining operations
- but this tour ended up being a trap. One of the mining droids had been sabotaged by one of the
Sith Lords’ business rivals, and it intentionally caused an accident that led to a mine collapse.
As the Sith Lords escaped, Darth Plagueis saw his chance and took it, using the Force to collapse
a section of cavern roof on his master. Tenebrous was caught off-guard, and with his death, Darth
Plagueis became the new Dark Lord of the Sith. After taking control of the Sith’s many operations
and eliminating several Force-sensitive rivals, Plagueis set his sights on another lesser-known
planet, the Mid Rim world Naboo, where large lodes of plasma had recently been discovered.
Hoping to control Naboo’s plasma reserves through the IGBC and Trade Federation, Plagueis
traveled to the planet in support of Bon Tapalo, a candidate for the planet’s elected monarchy,
who supported opening Naboo to increased trade with the outside galaxy. While on Naboo, Plagueis
encountered a young man by the name of Palpatine, the eldest son of Cosinga Palpatine, one of
Naboo’s most powerful aristocrats and a staunch isolationist. A delinquent and misanthropist
[pronounced MISS-anth-rope-ist], the young man had acted as a spy for Tapalo’s campaign to spite
his father, and his manipulation skills earned him the respect and curiosity of Plagueis, who, as
Hego Damask, took the young man under his wing. As Plagueis would soon learn,
Palpatine was Force-sensitive, and very strongly so. Not only that, but he had
a natural inclination towards the Dark Side; though he was capable of masking it, he
was a psychopath, full of hatred and bile, especially for his father. Plagueis manipulated
him into embracing the Dark Side, which Palpatine used to murder Cosinga and his entire family.
Once this was done, Plagueis covered up the massacre and took the young man as his new Sith
apprentice, giving him the name Darth Sidious. Plagueis trained Sidious for over a decade, during
which Sidious, in his public life as Palpatine, went into Naboo politics. Initially, he
stuck to small, out-of-the-way positions, slowly climbing his way up Naboo’s political
ladder, which enabled him to leave to train with Plagueis regularly. By 56 BBY, however,
Sidious’s training was close to complete, and he began to reach for more prominent positions.
After he was appointed to act as a junior ambassador in Naboo’s senatorial delegation,
he orchestrated the assassination of Vidar Kim, Naboo’s Senator, following which he took Kim’s
place as Senator for the Chommell Sector. Around this time, Darth Plagueis became much
more reclusive following his narrow escape from an assassination attempt, focusing his efforts
on his study of midi-chlorians and immortality. He left the work of implementing the final
stages of the Sith Grand Plan to Darth Sidious, who began a decades-long campaign of manipulation.
Sidious became the “shadow benefactor” of several soon-to-be-powerful groups and individuals, the
chosen pawns of the Sith. As Senator Palpatine, meanwhile, he became one of the most well-known
and respected voices in the Senate, a moderate whose quiet demeanor and apparent humility belied
his increasing power over galactic politics. As Plagueis and Sidious manipulated events
from behind the scenes, local wars became more frequent across the Mid and Outer Rims, some
spurred on by the Sith and others the result of diminishing Republic authority. Many were fought
between remote Republic and Trade Federation detachments and the outlaw factions that were
growing increasingly common in the Outer Rim. Some of these pirates had Sith backing,
but most were just opportunists. Slavers affiliated with the Hutts and Black
Sun prowled the southern Outer Rim, while in the northern Outer Rim the Trandoshans,
Zygerrians, and Thalassians had their own slaving operations. The Jedi and Republic
Judicials frequently battled these groups, liberating as many slaves as they could and
doing their best to prevent slaver incursions into Republic space, but they simply lacked
the numbers to properly deal with the crisis, leaving the overwhelmed Outer Rim PSFs to turn
to the Trade Defense Force for assistance. As the attention of the Jedi and Judicials were
drawn away by these crises, they were less able to handle larger local wars. One such conflict
from this period was the Andoan Wars, fought between Ando’s Spiverelda government and the
Andoan Free Colonies. Lasting from 57 to 39 BBY, this conflict devastated a swath of the
Lambda Sector and saw the rise of a Harch Spiverelda admiral named Trench, who nearly
destroyed the Free Colonies entirely before the Andoan Wars were forcibly ended by
Judicial intervention. The Free Colonies came under Judicial protection,
and the Spiverelda was disarmed. The Judicials and the Jedi were quicker to
respond to the Arkanian Revolution of 50 BBY, in which a faction of Arkanian scientists
known as the Arkanian Renegades launched a coup against the reigning Arkanian Dominion.
The Renegades initially fought to end the injustices and cruel experiments
perpetrated by the Arkanian Dominion, but during the war they quickly resorted
to the same sorts of abominable tactics, becoming even worse than their enemies. The
Jedi quickly crushed the Arkanian Revolution and disbanded the Renegades, bringing this
conflict, at least, to a swift resolution. Some factions even declared war on the
Republic during this period. In 65 BBY, the Bitthævrians did exactly that after what
they considered unacceptable encroachment by Republic traders into their territory in
the Kadoc Regions. The Bitthævrian army, the m’Yalfor’ac Order, never actually invaded
Republic space, so the Judicial Forces never moved against them directly. Instead, Jedi
recruited a neighboring species, the Kaleesh, to fight the Bitthævrians for them, arming and
training them before covertly sending them off to invade Bitthævrian space. After five
years of fighting, the Kaleesh grand army, the kolkpravis, was triumphant,
and the Bitthævrians were disarmed. The Republic then left the Kaleesh out to dry
when, just a few years later, Kalee was invaded by the , an insectoid species from the planet
Huk. The Yam’rii attempted to colonize Kalee and take the Kaleesh as slaves, and despite
several Kaleesh appeals to the Senate, the Republic did nothing, as the Yam’rii worlds
were rich in valuable resources, giving the invaders economic leverage. This conflict, the
Huk Wars, only ended when the Kaleesh themselves drove the Yam’rii offworld under the leadership of
a warlord named Grievous, who subsequently led an invasion of the Yam’rii homeworlds. This time,
the Yam’rii appealed to the Senate for help, and the Senate dispatched the Judicials to
disarm the Kaleesh and send their armies home. These wars were all part of a growing pattern
of instability in the Republic, and the Republic’s handling of them ultimately ended up
alienating many of the factions involved. The Spiverelda-loyal portion of the Aqualish and Harch
populaces was radicalized against the Republic by the Judicial intervention in the Andoan Wars, as
were the Kaleesh, who were subjected to crippling Republic sanctions after the end of the Huk
Wars, which caused the deaths of millions by starvation. Slowly but surely, the Republic
was making itself enemies, many of which were subsequently recruited by the Sith - most notably
including a Mandalorian by the name of Jango Fett. The Mandalorians in this era were mostly a
shadow of their former selves. The pacifist New Mandalorians ruled Mandalore and
the Mandalore Sector from Sundari, and the numbers of the Faithful, those
Mandalorians who continued to follow the warrior codes, had declined over the centuries.
This decline was dramatically worsened by the Mandalorian Civil War, which began in 60 BBY,
after the latest Mand’alor, Jaster Mereel, tried to implement new honor codes for the Mandalorians
to be bound by, which called for the Mandalorians to act as disciplined, morally-driven mercenaries
instead of thugs and conquerors. A faction of Mandalorians led by Tor Vizsla, known as the
Death Watch, declared these reforms to be heresy, and they went to war with Mereel’s followers,
who called themselves the True Mandalorians. Over the course of the Civil War, the
Death Watch whittled the numbers of the True Mandalorians down. Jaster Mereel
was killed with the help of a traitor named Montross on Korda Six in 52 BBY,
leaving Mereel’s adopted son, Jango Fett, as the True Mandalorians’ leader. Under Fett,
the True Mandalorians struck back and crippled the Death Watch, but the Death Watch got their
revenge in the Battle of Galidraan. That battle, fought in 44 BBY, saw Tor Vizsla and the Death
Watch lure the True Mandalorians into a battle with a Jedi task force led by the famed
Jedi Master Dooku. The Battle of Galidraan saw the True Mandalorians wiped out, with only
Fett surviving. Fett was captured by the Jedi and handed over to the governor of Galidraan,
who was secretly allied with the Death Watch. The governor stripped Fett of his
armor and sold him into slavery, and while Fett ultimately escaped, killed
the governor, and reclaimed his armor, the True Mandalorians were destroyed. Fett was
able to kill Tor Vizsla and most of the Death Watch’s leaders after his escape in 34 BBY,
following which Death Watch went into hiding. This ended the Mandalorian Civil War, but
the damage was already done; the Mandalorian Faithful had largely been wiped out, and Jango
Fett went on to become a simple bounty hunter. As should already be evident, the Jedi Order
was hard-pressed to handle all of the crises afflicting the Republic. This made it easier
for factions like the Yam’rii and Death Watch to manipulate the Jedi to their own ends, especially
as the Force became shrouded in darkness, blinding the Jedi to the dark forces active
in the galaxy. It also diminished the Jedi’s abilities to prevent threats from within, such
as that posed by the renegade apprentice Xanatos. Xanatos was the second Padawan of the great Jedi
Master Qui-Gon Jinn, an unorthodox maverick who often disagreed with the decisions of the Jedi
Council. Qui-Gon had discovered Xanatos on Telos IV during a mission there and chose him as
his Padawan when Xanatos came of age, as the boy was a prodigy with a strong connection to the
Force. Xanatos was also prideful and power-hungry, however, and his pride was only made worse after
he learned that he was the son of the Governor of Telos, a man named Crion. Qui-Gon failed
to see the threat these flaws posed, however, which led to disaster in 53 BBY, when Qui-Gon
and Xanatos were sent on a mission to Telos. During that mission, Jinn and Xanatos discovered
that Governor Crion was corrupt and planning to invade Toprawa, one of Telos’s neighbors. After
Jinn revealed this to the Telosian populace, they rose up against Crion, who sent in the Telosian
army to massacre them. Qui-Gon ultimately helped the revolutionaries overthrow Crion, whom he
was forced to kill in their final confrontation. But this drove Xanatos mad with grief; he had
reconnected with his father during the mission and had secretly been on Crion’s side the whole time.
In his grief over Crion’s death, Xanatos fell to the Dark Side and attacked Qui-Gon. Qui-Gon
prevailed in the resultant duel, but Xanatos escaped, and over the course of the next decade,
he plotted revenge against Qui-Gon and the Jedi, taking control of the Offworld Mining Corporation
and using it in several plots against the Order. These plots were ultimately thwarted by Qui-Gon
and his latest Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Qui-Gon had refused to take a new Padawan
for years after Xanatos’s fall, which he blamed himself for failing to foresee
and stop, but in 44 BBY he ultimately decided to train Kenobi after the young man had proved
himself on a mission to Bandomeer. Kenobi had originally washed out of Jedi training and
had been assigned to the Agricultural Corps, but after ending up on Bandomeer he proved to be
a great help to Qui-Gon, ultimately convincing the jaded Jedi Master to train him. Together, Qui-Gon
and Obi-Wan put a stop to Xanatos’s plots, and the Dark Jedi ultimately killed himself in 44 BBY
after the two foiled his latest scheme on Telos. As the Great Peace of the Republic
steadily became less peaceful, some in the Senate began to argue that the only
solution to the Republic’s problems was to reform the Republic Military. These Militarists were
led by the Senator from the Seswenna Sector, a man named Ranulph Tarkin. Tarkin was the
patriarch of the wealthy and powerful Tarkin family of Eriadu, which, together with four
other wealthy families, ruled the planet as part of an oligarchy known as the Quintad. Tarkin
was an aggressive and somewhat unstable man, described by future Supreme Chancellor Finis
Valorum as being “not reasonable at the best of times.” However, Tarkin’s wealth and his family’s
political position gave him tremendous power, which he used to push the Militarist position
both in the Senate and back in his home sector. Tarkin had served in the Seswenna
Defense Forces, his home sector’s PSF, and as an officer in the SDF, he had led several
successful campaigns against the pirates that plagued the outer reaches of the sector. His time
in the SDF convinced him that military force was the only solution to the pirate scourge, as well
as to the general breakdown of what he considered law and order in the Outer Rim. Tarkin originally
sought to remilitarize just the Seswenna Sector; to that end, he left the SDF to become an
executive at Quintad Orbital Manufacturing, a Tarkin family-owned, Eriadu-based shipbuilding
firm that made military hardware. During his time at QOM, Tarkin brokered contracts with the
Republic’s major manufacturers of military vessels, which began to operate out of QOM
shipyards, and then, after turning leadership of QOM over to a cousin of his, Tarkin talked
the Seswenna Sector’s senator into appointing him the sector’s Governor-General, which put him in
charge of the Seswenna Defense Forces. In 57 BBY, Governor-General Tarkin then used his new
authority over the SDF to conduct a major military buildup, commissioning a fleet of new,
state-of-the-art military warships from QOM and its new partners. However, this got Tarkin in hot
water with the Judicials. The Ruusan Reformation, which had established the decentralized,
sector-based PSF system, also set limits on the size of sector forces, as well as on the
firepower of warships in those sector forces. Thus, the Judicials shut down Tarkin’s project,
capping the size of the Seswenna Defense Forces. But Tarkin wasn’t ready to give up on
militarization that easily. There were loopholes in the Ruusan Reformations that allowed
sector governments to make lend-lease deals with shipbuilding firms, placing large fleets of
capital ships under the control of their Planetary Security Forces without actually incorporating
them into the PSFs. Fleets assembled in this way, known as demonstration fleets, weren’t regulated
by the Ruusan Reformations, so sector governments could use them to legally establish fleets
well beyond the official limits. This was pretty common in the Core Worlds, where wealthy
sectors with credits to waste on vanity projects built up massive demonstration fleets of advanced
and barely legal warships. Since the vast majority of these ships never saw any action and the whole
thing was just Core World lightsaber-measuring, neither the Judicials nor the Senate cared
all that much about closing the loophole. But when Ranulph Tarkin started doing the same
thing, establishing lend-lease deals with QOM’s partners and amassing enormous demonstration
fleets under the de facto control of the SDF, many Senators were alarmed. Tarkin wasn’t
showing off, after all - he intended to use his demonstration fleets, and that could have
severe ramifications for the Republic as a whole. Tarkin’s next move did nothing to assuage
these fears. He began striking mutual defense pacts with neighboring sectors
left and right, leveraging the wealth of the Seswenna Sector to gain influence over the
largely poor sectors that made up the Western Reaches. In exchange for a substantial
economic boost from the Seswenna Sector, these neighboring sectors combined their Planetary
Security Forces with the SDF under the banner of the Outland Regions Security Forces, which was
under the ultimate command of Governor-General Tarkin. The ORSF member PSFs would share
ships, personnel, and navigational data, and they would treat their combined territory as
a single theater of operations - an oversector. Tarkin claimed that the Outland Regions Security
Force was simply a model for how a reformed Republic Military could operate, but his political
opponents, such as Senator Valorum of the Lytten Sector, argued that this was just branding, and
that Tarkin was engaging in empire-building. Their arguments had plenty of merit; the
ORSF was sketchy in quite a few ways. It had effectively bought the loyalty and cooperation of
neighboring sectors by leveraging economic relief for acquiescence, it referred to its theater
of operations as the “Greater Seswenna,” and virtually all its personnel were humans, which
Tarkin claimed wasn’t the result of speciesism, but rather “concern for unit morale and a desire
to standardize systems and procedures,” to quote the Essential Guide to Warfare. Obviously, that
was a load of nonsense, but it was a specific brand of nonsense that the Militarist faction
as a whole was up to its neck in. As is probably obvious by now, when Ranulph Tarkin railed
against a lack of law and order in the Outer Rim, he wasn’t just talking about piracy;
he was a closet humanocentrist, and he believed that “order” could only
be brought about through human domination of nonhuman worlds. The ORSF was not just a model
for how Tarkin envisioned a new Republic Military, but a model of how Tarkin quietly believed the
Republic as a whole should operate - centralized under overwhelmingly human authority. Much of
the Militarist faction shared similar beliefs. For the most part, Tarkin ignored the
criticisms of his political opponents, with only one exception. Some Senators framed
Tarkin and the Militarists as disloyal, claiming that their empire-building was the first
step in a plan to break away from the Republic, and this allegation really got to Tarkin. To
prove them wrong, he emphasized that the ORSF was meant as a template for the Republic Military,
even instructing ORSF personnel to refer to the paramilitary as the Republic Navy and Republic
Army, and in 54 BBY, Tarkin turned command of the ORSF over to one of his cousins so he could go
to Coruscant as the Seswenna Sector’s new Senator. As Senator, Tarkin used his platform to push the
Militarist position constantly, waging a highly publicized legal battle with the Judicial Forces
over their enforcement of the Ruusan Reformation. For many years, this amounted to little more than
theater; the Republic’s crises weren’t severe enough for Tarkin’s arguments to resonate with
many outside of the hardline Militarist camp. But in 44 BBY, Tarkin finally found his wedge issue
with the outbreak of the Stark Hyperspace War. This conflict began when the
Stark Commercial Combine, a band of pirates led by crime lord Iaco
Stark, took advantage of bacta shortages on Thyferra by raiding Trade Federation bacta
transports and reselling the stolen bacta to Outer Rim worlds that couldn’t afford it. This
campaign caused a shortage of bacta in the Core and furor in the Senate, and it was actually more
complex than it seemed; Stark was actually in league with the leaders of the Trade Federation,
who made the Combine’s raids easy in exchange for a cut of Stark’s profits and the opportunity
to raise their prices for bacta in the Core. Tarkin and the Militarists seized on these
raids, with Tarkin threatening that if the Judicials didn’t put down the Stark Commercial
Combine, the Outland Regions Security Force would, Republic law be damned. The Trade Federation’s
Senate representative, Minister Nute Gunray, also seized on the raids to demand to
be allowed to increase the size of the Trade Federation’s private armies for security
purposes. But for once, cooler heads prevailed in the Senate. Senator Valorum instead called for
diplomacy between the Republic, Trade Federation, and Stark Commercial Combine to resolve the
crisis, and both the Senate and Iaco Stark himself agreed with him. The Republic and the
Combine arranged a summit on remote Troiken, with the Senate sending Valorum and Gunray as
its representatives, escorted by a team of Jedi. The location of the summit was kept
secret to prevent outside interference, but Senator Tarkin was able to learn
its location by blackmailing Gunray, and he arranged for the Outland Regions Security
Force to show up at the summit and wipe out the Stark Commercial Combine, which he hoped would
earn support for the Militarist position and discredit Valorum. This would be a major
violation of the Ruusan Reformation, but that was part of the point - Tarkin hoped that
public support for his actions would lead to the Reformation being weakened or discarded.
Thus, Tarkin assembled the entire ORSF fleet, which he would personally lead from his flagship,
Invincible. But unbeknownst to Tarkin, the Combine knew of his plans, and Stark had arranged
for the whole summit on Troiken to be a trap. When the Republic dignitaries arrived at
Troiken, Stark’s men drew their weapons on them. Stark believed that Valorum had tried
to set him up, accusing him of calling in Tarkin’s fleet to destroy the Combine while
negotiations were underway. In response, Stark had set traps of his own; his agents had
seeded the navicomputers of the entire ORSF fleet with a computer virus. When Tarkin’s
fleet jumped to hyperspace, most of it was taken off-course. Some of the Militarist ships
ended up lost on the other end of the galaxy; others were flown into planets, moons, or black
holes, destroying them and wiping out their crews. Only a handful of Tarkin’s fleet, including
the Invincible, made it anywhere near Troiken, ending up in the Qotile System, where the
whole Stark Combine fleet was waiting for them. On Troiken, battle broke out between the
Jedi and Stark’s men. On the urging of Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, Nute Gunray ordered
his security droids to join the fight, but in his panic, the actual order
he gave was “kill them all,” which the droids interpreted literally. They
fired on the Jedi as well as Stark’s men, mortally wounding the renowned Wookiee Jedi
Master Tyvokka and generally making a mess of things. This allowed Stark to escape, while the
Jedi and Republic dignitaries fled to Mount Avos. In orbit, the tattered remains of Tarkin’s
fleet, at less than quarter-strength, managed to make it to Troiken, still under
heavy fire from the Combine fleet and severely outnumbered. Tarkin ordered his surviving men
to abandon ship and link up with the Jedi at Mount Avos via their escape pods. The troop
carriers were evacuated first, allowing large portions of Tarkin’s ground army to make it
to Mount Avos, where Tarkin and the surviving naval personnel joined them. The ORSF fleet was
destroyed, while Tarkin and the army regrouped with the Jedi in a network of abandoned mines on
Mount Avos, which Stark’s forces began shelling with ground-based artillery. Gunray and Tarkin
suggested surrender, but Valorum and Plo Koon, who had taken command of the Jedi task force
after the death of Tyvokka, urged otherwise. Plo Koon was able to telepathically probe Iaco
Stark’s mind as he described the next stage of his plans to the other Combine directors,
allowing the Jedi to outmaneuver and defeat Stark’s forces when they attempted
to storm the mountain. Frustrated, Stark then ordered his troops to abandon
the assault and instead encircle Mount Avos, hoping to starve the Republic forces out.
After telepathically sensing this plan as well, Koon decided to have Tarkin’s second in command,
Jace Dallin, lead the ORSF ground forces in a diversionary strike against the encircling
Combine forces, while Adi Gallia, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Obi-Wan Kenobi stole a Combine ship with which
to ferry Valorum and Gunray back to Coruscant, where they were to try to convince the
Senate not to give in to Stark’s demands. Koon offered Tarkin the opportunity to
leave with them, but Tarkin refused, unwilling to let a nonhuman take command of the
ORSF. Koon’s plan was successful, and Gallia escorted the two Senators back to Coruscant,
while Jinn and Kenobi returned to Mount Avos. On Coruscant, Valorum singlehandedly talked
the Senate down from caving, but he was unable to convince them to send Judicial
reinforcements to Troiken. Back on Troiken, Plo Koon telepathically sensed this decision
after Stark’s agents reported it back to him, after Tarkin’s men successfully fought off yet
another Combine assault on the mountain. With no chance of Republic relief, Koon came up
with another plan; he and the Jedi gathered in meditation to boost his telepathic powers
to allow him to reach Sha Koon, his niece, who was on Coruscant. The effort was
successful, and the two Kel Dor were able to establish communication between
the Jedi Council and the Troiken team. Plo Koon and the Council ultimately
formulated a plan to convince Nute Gunray to give them a Trade Federation fleet
to carry Jedi reinforcements to Troiken, which would be sufficient to crush the
Combine’s remaining forces and end the war. Plo Koon then telepathically relayed
this plan to Stark and offered him amnesty if he defected and gave the Jedi the password
required to release all affected ships from the Combine’s computer virus. Stark, seeing
that the situation was hopeless, agreed. Meanwhile, the Trade Federation fleet arrived
above Troiken and destroyed the Combine fleet, while Republic forces at Mount Avos evacuated
through the mines while the remaining Combine ground forces charged through the front entrance.
Plo Koon’s plan was to seal both entrances once the Combine troops were inside, trapping them
harmlessly inside - but Ranulph Tarkin had other plans. He stole a detonator charge and snuck back
into the mines, where he used the charge to blow up the blocked entrance to a cave that contained
a swarm of flesh-eating insects, which wiped out the Combine troops. Tarkin killed himself in the
blast, but in the process he had achieved his goal of wiping out the Stark Commercial Combine, which
the Militarists seized upon to declare him a hero. The very same Lord Sidious had been behind a
great many of the crises that afflicted the Republic in this period. He was not only the
“shadow benefactor” of Iaco Stark, but also a friend of the Tarkin family in his day-to-day
guise as Senator Palpatine, and after the Stark Hyperspace War, he also got involved with Nute
Gunray. Sidious engineered Gunray’s rise to Viceroy of the Trade Federation, secretly removing
obstacles from Gunray’s path, all without the Neimoidian ever knowing. Gunray ultimately never
contacted Sidious, despite Iaco Stark’s message, but Sidious eventually reached out to him all
the same. In 33 BBY, Sidious contacted Gunray and established a partnership with him, one that
he would use to great effect in the coming years. In these manipulations, Sidious was frequently
assisted by his prized Sith assassin, a Dathomirian Zabrak named Maul. Maul had been
given to Sidious as a young child by his mother, the Nightsister Kycina, and despite still
being the apprentice to Darth Plagueis, Sidious decided to train Maul in the ways
of the Sith. Plagueis was aware of this, but as Sidious was only training Maul in part of
the Sith arts, training him as an assassin instead of a true Sith Lord, Plagueis approved. As more of
his time was eaten up by manipulating the Senate, Sidious began to send Maul out to do his dirty
work. It was Maul, for instance, who had done the groundwork in ensuring Gunray’s rise to
power; he had also assassinated several Jedi, and he would play a major role in Sidious’s next
big undertaking, the Yinchorri Uprising of 33 BBY. The Yinchorri were a hardy reptilian species
that had only recently joined the Republic, and Plagueis and Sidious had been watching them
closely for decades. The Sith Lords felt that the Yinchorri could pose a significant
threat to them - they were expansionist, aggressive, immune to mind-affecting
Force powers, and they made extensive use of lightsaber-resistant cortosis shields. The
Sith wanted the Yinchorri threat contained - and they wanted to use the Yinchorri to
weaken their enemies in the process. Thus, Darth Sidious, with the help of Darth
Maul, engineered the Yinchorri Uprising. Sith agents were able to radicalize
the Yinchorri against the Jedi Order, and the Yinchorri then seized control of the
Golden Nyss Shipyards, amassed a fleet of warships, and began attacking neighboring
systems. This prompted Jedi intervention, which only provoked the Yinchorri further.
Under Maul’s supervision, the Yinchorri attacked the Jedi Temple itself, where they
hoped to kill a bunch of younglings to make a point. The Jedi sensed this attack coming and
wiped out the Yinchorri commandos, but that the Yinchorri had managed to attack the Jedi Temple
at all was cause for alarm across the Republic. Meanwhile, the Jedi task force in the Yinchorr
System came under attack, leading to the death of Jedi Master and Council member Micah
Giett. The remaining Jedi were only saved when Supreme Chancellor Valorum, after calling
in virtually every political favor he was owed, got the Senate to initiate sanctions and a
trade embargo against the Yinchorri worlds, and the Judicial Forces were then dispatched to put
down the uprising and rescue the surviving Jedi. At the end of the day, the Yinchorri were
defeated, but several Jedi were killed trying to stop them, and Supreme Chancellor
Valorum’s government was weakened, as he was seen as ineffective for failing
to prevent the uprising in the first place. This was precisely the outcome the Sith
had sought; the Yinchorri were contained, the Jedi Order had suffered the loss of several
of its greatest members, and Valorum’s shrinking support put a certain Senator Palpatine
in a position to oust and replace him. By the end of the Yinchorri Uprising, Darth
Sidious’s plans were rapidly approaching their culmination, the beginning of the final
stage of the Sith Grand Plan. He and Darth Plagueis would soon make a play to get him
elected Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, allowing the final stage of the Grand Plan,
the fall of the Republic and the Jedi, to begin. Throughout 33 BBY, Sidious, largely
through Darth Maul, put a final few pieces in place and eliminated a few lingering threats to
the Sith. That year, Sidious dispatched Maul to wipe out the leaders of Black Sun, crippling one
of the galaxy’s most powerful criminal enterprises and making the group easier for the Sith to
control. Not long after, on Naboo, Darth Plagueis assassinated the long-reigning King Ars Veruna of
Naboo for planning to remove Palpatine as Senator, allowing the much younger Padmé Amidala, who
had no such plans, to be elected Queen of Naboo. Shortly thereafter, in late 33 BBY, Sidious set
the stage for what was to come with one last plot. Around this time, a terrorist group that called
itself the Nebula Front ramped up its attacks on Trade Federation shipping. The Nebula Front had
been harassing the Trade Federation for decades out of opposition to its unjust practices and the
control it had over the Outer Rim. But in 33 BBY, they carried out a more daring attack than they
had ever attempted before, attacking a Trade Federation cargo ship above Dorvalla, a mining
planet recently acquired by the Trade Federation thanks to the covert work of Darth Maul. The
Nebula Front successfully captured the ship, from which they stole billions of credits’
worth of aurodium ingots from its cargo hold. The Trade Federation, naturally, was livid.
Its Senator, the Neimoidian Lott Dod, petitioned the Senate to yet again loosen the cap
on the Trade Federation’s droid armies, claiming that further deregulation was necessary to secure
Federation shipments from Nebula Front attacks. But this proposal was met with controversy. Over
the course of the past few decades, the Trade Defense Force had steadily grown in size, and it
had grown to include a large droid army. This was, as we mentioned earlier, an essential part
of the Trade Federation business model, as it could offer potential client worlds security from
pirates in exchange for essentially taking them over. Originally, the Senate had supported this
strategy, as the TDF was effective at battling pirates, but as the Trade Federation’s power grew,
it became increasingly corrupt and exploitative, and many in the Senate were starting to see it
as a growing and increasingly unregulated empire. On the suggestion of Senator Palpatine,
Supreme Chancellor Valorum proposed a compromise - the Trade Federation would be
allowed to increase the size of its armies, but in exchange, the Senate would resume taxation
of the Mid and Outer Rims, effectively abolishing the Free Trade Zones. The Trade Federation,
predictably, wasn’t happy with this proposal, and the Senate deadlocked. Hoping to resolve the
deadlock, Valorum, again on Senator Palpatine’s suggestion, called for a summit for all parties
to discuss the proposed legislation on Eriadu. As the Eriadu Trade Summit approached, Sidious
spurred several of his pawns into action. He directed the Nebula Front, which, of course,
he controlled from the shadows, to attempt to assassinate Supreme Chancellor Valorum at the
Eriadu summit. He also convinced Viceroy Gunray of the Trade Federation to begin building his
new droid army anyway, which he did; on Gunray’s orders, several Trade Federation bulk freighters
were secretly converted into battleships, which took delivery of hordes of Baktoid battle
droids and armored vehicles, as well as fleets of Haor Chall Engineering transport craft and Vulture
Droids. This secret army was amassed entirely under the purview of the Trade Federation’s
Neimoidian faction, which was led by Gunray. At this point in time, the Trade
Federation wasn’t Neimoidian-controlled; Neimoidians were still a minority within the
organization, if a rapidly growing one. Viceroy Gunray, in fact, was the only Neimoidian on
the seven-member Trade Federation Directorate, which ran the megacorporation, with the rest of
the Directorate consisting of four humans, a Gran, and a Sullustan. The Neimoidian faction
was disliked and distrusted by the other elements of the Trade Federation, and despite
being Viceroy, Gunray felt his power over the organization was constrained by the Directorate,
who he believed had only begrudgingly accepted the idea of a Neimoidian viceroy. Nonetheless,
Gunray had full power over the Neimoidian faction, which allowed him to conceal the extent of the new
Trade Federation Droid Army from the Directorate, which believed that Gunray had only replaced
its older battle droids with more sophisticated models. These more sophisticated battle droids
acted as security for the Trade Federation Directorate during the Eriadu Trade Summit,
which saw the whole Directorate attend to discuss the taxation of the Free Trade Zones
with Valorum and the Republic delegation, as well as with the representatives
of a slew of other interested parties. As the delegates gathered on Eriadu, the Jedi
uncovered the Nebula Front plot to assassinate Valorum and moved to stop them. They ultimately
showed up too late; just as the summit was beginning, a Nebula Front sniper took a shot at
Valorum, throwing the assembled delegates into a panic. But the sniper had missed - just as he had
been ordered to do, for Valorum was not Sidious’s true target. As soon as the sniper opened fire,
a ray shield had been activated to protect the Trade Federation Directorate - and when the shield
was up, the Directorate’s own battle droids turned on them. With the Jedi and Judicials helpless to
stop them due to the shield, the droids massacred the entire Directorate except for Viceroy
Gunray, who was out of the room at the time. The Eriadu Trade Summit ended in disaster,
exactly as Darth Sidious had intended. As the sole remaining member of the Trade Federation
Directorate, Nute Gunray now had complete control over the Trade Federation. He stacked the empty
seats on the Directorate with the other leaders of the Neimoidian faction, including Chief Settlement
Officer Rune Haako, Trade Federation Senator Lott Dod, TDF Captain Daultay Dofine, and Deputy
Viceroy Hath Monchar, the latter of whom tried to betray Gunray to the Jedi but was assassinated
by Darth Maul. With the Trade Federation now under complete Neimoidian control, Gunray finished
amassing, testing, and mobilizing the secret droid army, which was now considerably
larger than it was legally allowed to be. In the furor after the Trade Summit, the Senate
passed Valorum’s proposed tax on the Free Trade Zones over the objections of the Trade Federation.
Over the course of the next few months, the results were seen immediately - the Republic
economy saw a boost from the massive increase in tax revenue, while the Trade Federation’s
profits sharply declined. But Valorum was unable to celebrate his victory, as his Chancellorship
became mired in scandal when it came out that the aurodium ingots stolen by the Nebula Front had
been deposited in his family’s accounts. Valorum strongly denied association with the Nebula Front,
but the Senate nonetheless passed several measures severely limiting his power, curtailing
his authority over the Judicial Forces and appointing the legalistic, procedure-focused
Mas Amedda as the new Vice Chancellor to keep Valorum in check. This completely paralyzed
Valorum’s Chancellorship, and with it the Senate. As the Senate descended ever deeper into gridlock,
Lord Sidious informed Gunray that everything was ready for the Trade Federation to put their
droid army to use and blockade a Rim system in protest over the taxation of the Free Trade
Zones. Gunray initially wanted to target Eriadu, but Sidious suggested an easier target -
Naboo, the homeworld of the Senator who had proposed the tax bill in the first place.
Gunray agreed, and the Trade Federation began mobilizing its forces at Enarc, from which
it would establish the Blockade of Naboo. We all know what happened next. The Blockade of
Naboo became the Invasion of Naboo, the first in a series of events that propelled Senator Palpatine
to the Supreme Chancellery. That night, the victorious Supreme Chancellor Palpatine met with
one Hego Damask on Coruscant, where the two secret Sith Lords drank to their victory. Darth Plagueis,
heavily inebriated, fell asleep for the first time in many years, and Darth Sidious saw his chance.
He murdered his master and usurped the title of Dark Lord of the Sith, taking full control of
the Sith Grand Plan. In the ensuing decade, he would see to it that the events on Naboo were
only the beginning of a much larger conflict, which would see the Republic toppled, the Jedi
Order destroyed, and the Sith triumphant at last. Well, that’s our overview of the decades of
galactic history immediately preceding The Phantom Menace. We hope you’ve enjoyed
this little prelude to the film’s 25th anniversary. But what do you think? Would you
like to see more detailed videos about any of these stories? Let us know your thoughts in
the comments section below. And as always guys, thank you so much for watching and
I hope to see you in the next video.
