In the Star Wars galaxy, no word carried
as much fear as the word Sith, a name that, at various points, referred to
a species, a few civilizations, and an order of powerful Darksiders. The Sith
haunted the Republic for its final few millennia, bringing it to the brink of collapse in war after
war, all part of their eternal crusade against the Jedi Order. Eventually, the Sith were successful
in destroying both the Republic and the Jedi, though they themselves were destroyed soon after.
But despite their role in galactic history, the Sith are still largely unknown to many Star
Wars fans. In this video, we’re gonna try to change that, tackling the history of the various
Sith Orders and why they differed from each other. Unlike the Jedi Order, which existed as one
continuous organization until the Sith brought it down, the Sith were much more fractious.
The main order went through a variety of mutations over the years, and there were a
number of offshoots as well. In this video, we’ll be covering the six main “dynasties”:
the original Sith, Naga Sadow’s Sith, the True Sith, Revan’s Sith, the New
Sith, and the Order of the Sith Lords. The first Sith Lords were twelve Dark Jedi,
Exiles sent out into the unknown by the Jedi as punishment after the Hundred-Year
Darkness. They landed on Korriban, where they discovered the Sith species, a race
of red-skinned, Force-sensitive humanoids. The Exiles conquered the Sith, taking their
adopted homeworld of Ziost as their capital, and declared themselves the Lords of the Sith,
the rulers of a new Sith Empire. Through alchemy, the Exiles were able to merge their
bloodlines with those of the native Sith, ensuring future generations of Sith Lords would
be just as strong in the Force as they were. The ranks of the first Sith Empire were
almost entirely composed of Force-sensitives, as all Sith were naturally open to the Dark Side
and actually drew on it as a form of sustenance, empowering it in turn. They were not
all Sith Lords, however. That title was reserved to a council of twelve, the heirs of
the original exiles. Per the original system, the Sith Lords were the twelve Sith in the
Empire who were the strongest in the Force, with two of the council being elevated
above the others -- the ruling Lord and his second-in-command. The latter received the
title of Shadow Hand, while the former was the Dark Lord of the Sith. Sith became Sith
Lords through a mixture of backstabbing, contests of power, and manipulation, so as to
ensure the strongest always ruled the Empire. By the time of the end of its Golden Age in 5000
BBY, the Sith Empire ruled just around 120 worlds, and yet it had the strength to match
the Republic, which was dramatically larger. This was in no small part due to the
formidableness of the Sith species and the completeness of their military machine. Many
Dark Lords over the course of the Empire’s history were responsible for this strength.
Ajunta Pall, the leader of the original Exiles, laid the Empire’s foundations, while Tulak Horde,
perhaps the greatest Sith warrior to ever live, more than doubled the Empire’s size. Marka
Ragnos brought the Empire into its Golden Age through manipulation of his rivals -
only for it to all come crumbling down. Almost immediately after Ragnos’ death, a power
struggle began between the Sith Lords. The two greatest of the Sith, Ludo Kressh and Naga
Sadow, vied for the title of Dark Lord even during Ragnos’ funeral. Sadow triumphed
with promises of conquering the Republic, but his attempted war of conquest - the Great
Hyperspace War - failed, and the armies of the Sith fell back to Korriban in tatters. There,
Sadow’s fleet was met by another fleet led by Ludo Kressh, who was still salty over being
the runner-up, and there, above Korriban, the Sith Empire destroyed itself. Sadow
killed Kressh, but he was forced to flee when the Republic followed his fleet back to the
Empire. In his absence, the Republic carried out the Sith holocaust, wiping out both the Sith
species and the Sith Order - or so it seemed. In truth, not one but two groups of Sith had
escaped. By far the larger of the two was the True Sith, an army led by the infamous Darth
Vitiate, which settled on Dromund Kaas deep in the ruins of the Empire. But we’ll come back
to them later and instead focus first on the other group of escapees - Naga Sadow and his
Massassi warriors. They traveled to Yavin IV, where they built up a civilization in exile.
The Massassi weren’t the brightest of Sith, and so for hundreds of years, Sadow
was the last Sith Lord of his line. But that changed when he was discovered by Freedon
Nadd, a human Dark Jedi that sought the secrets of the Sith. Sadow took Nadd as his apprentice, but
after Nadd had learned all there was to teach, he killed his master and then went and used
his newfound abilities to conquer and rule over Onderon. Nadd died of old age, but his spirit
lived on, driving his descendants towards the Dark Side. A team of Jedi that included one Ulic
Qel-Droma purged Nadd’s influence from Onderon, but the conflict between them drew the attention
of Exar Kun, a proud Jedi Knight that sought to understand the Sith. Nadd’s spirit lured Kun over
to the Dark Side, guiding him first to Korriban and then to Yavin IV, where Kun claimed the
title of Dark Lord and destroyed Nadd’s spirit. Soon afterwards, Exar Kun took on a
fallen Ulic Qel-Droma as his apprentice, and together they orchestrated the Great
Sith War, which nearly destroyed the Jedi Order and the Republic alike. They swayed
armies of Jedi over to the Dark Side, inciting students to rise up against their
masters on a galactic scale. They were, however, defeated in 3996 BBY, the same year
they had begun their war, as Ulic returned to the Light and Kun destroyed his physical body,
leaving his spirit trapped and impotent on Yavin. They were the last of Naga Sadow’s dynasty of the
Sith, but they were no less important. Exar Kun reshaped what it meant to be Sith, forever
recasting the order as one of fallen Jedi, which would recruit from the ranks of its enemies.
He may not have lasted long, but as the spirit of Marka Ragnos said to him in a vision, "because
of [Exar Kun], the Sith would never die." The next dynasty of Sith would arise not even
forty years later, when Revan and Malak founded their own Empire. Like with Exar Kun, their
Sith Empire was built on legions of fallen Jedi, and they retained Kun’s tradition of
only having two proper Sith Lords, a Dark Lord and a Shadow Hand. But unlike the
Sith that came before them, Revan’s Sith didn’t really have much of a claim on the legacy
of Ajunta Pall. Revan filled his armies with fallen Jedi and traitorous Republic soldiers,
he built his fleets with Rakatan technology, and he trained his enforcers in an academy on
Korriban, but at the end of the day, that Empire was less one of Sith and more, as Kreia put
it, “the corrupted remnants of the Republic.” That Sith dynasty didn’t last very
long, either. After a few years, Malak struck down Revan and claimed the
title of Dark Lord, taking first Darth Bandon and then Bastila Shan as his Shadow
Hand, but the redeemed Revan came back and, like the total Chad he was, saved Bastila, killed
Bandon and Malak, and broke the back of the Sith Empire in a matter of weeks. Revan’s Sith lived
on for a few years under the Sith Triumvirate, a union of scattered forces led by Darth Traya,
Darth Nihilus, and Darth Sion, but in 3951 BBY, Meetra Surik came along and killed all three of
them and helped wipe out the last of their forces. Revan’s Sith were very, very different from
all those that came before and most of those that came after. It had the same guiding codes of
those Sith that came before, but other than that, it really was more of a dark mirror of the
Republic than anything. This was because Revan founded his Sith order not to oppose the
Republic but rather to transform it, so as to oppose other Sith - the True Sith Empire, led by
Darth Vitiate, which still waited in the dark. The True Sith quietly rebuilt in the shadows,
hiding from the Republic and nursing their strength until, it seemed, the Republic would
be unable to stop them. In 3681 BBY the Sith unleashed their armies against the Republic,
sparking the first of many, many wars between the two parties. By that point, the True Sith had
evolved greatly from the Empire whose legacy they carried on, and yet in many ways, they were true
to that legacy. Their ruling Dark Council of Sith Lords, who by that point all used the title of
Darth, numbered twelve, much like the original council of the Sith Lords, with only the Emperor,
Vitiate, elevated above them. Their culture, practices, and general Sithy-ness were
all carried over from the Empire of old. And yet the True Sith made changes to the Sith
ways, too. They began recruiting Sith Lords from the outside as well as from within, accepting
humans as second only to Sith Purebloods, as the original species was by then called.
Their aesthetics resembled those of Revan’s Empire more than those of the original Sith. But
more importantly, their ideology was different as well. While many of the Sith of the new
Empire were taught just as prior Sith had been, the leaders of the True Sith had their own radical
take on Dark Side philosophy - they sought to destroy the Will of the Force itself, and to
plunge the whole galaxy into chaos unending, turning it all into a cauldron of war and
constant, massive atrocities. Their leader, Darth Vitiate, took that ideology even
further - he sought to consume all life, much as Darth Nihilus had before him,
and to destroy the universe itself. Fortunately for the universe, he never came
anywhere near close to achieving that goal. The True Sith had a decided advantage over the
Republic, and in their first war, they succeeded in conquering half of it. It’s quite possible they
could’ve destroyed the Republic and the Jedi with it, were it not for Vitiate. Vitiate’s hunger for
power and urge to destroy eventually turned him against his own empire, leading him to attempt
a long series of schemes to conquer the galaxy, each more feeble than the last. Eventually Vitiate
was destroyed, and over the years that followed, the Sith Empire collapsed. Just a few centuries
after their triumph, the True Sith were all but destroyed, and for a millennium and a half,
it seemed, once more, that the Sith were dead and gone. With them died the Sith Purebloods,
and most of their original tenets and culture. But the Sith weren’t totally gone - a few
scattered cults carried on the legacy, unnoticed, in the Outer Rim. Then, in 2000 BBY, a
fallen Jedi Master named Phanius sought them out and learned the ways of the Sith from them,
declaring himself Darth Ruin and gathering hundreds of fallen Jedi to his side. Darth Ruin’s
new Sith were, appropriately, called the New Sith, and the thousand-year conflict that ensued
between them and the Republic was called the New Sith Wars. Ruin’s reign over the New Sith
was short, however. His take on Sith ideology was founded in extreme selfishness and egocentrism,
and his students eventually got sick of it, teamed up, and killed their master. This set
the tone for the next thousand years of Sithery. The New Sith were not a singular order; they were
a loose collection of untold thousands of small Sith groups, allying and jockeying with each other
in a bid to rule the galaxy. They had no common ideology, no common leader; they had nothing
in common, save the Sith Code. This changed in 1010 BBY, when the New Sith united under the
Brotherhood of Darkness, but the Brotherhood was destroyed just a decade later at the Battle of
Ruusan, thanks to the manipulations of Darth Bane. In the New Sith Wars, the New Sith by
all rights should’ve been triumphant, and as Darth Bane saw it, the reason they
weren’t was because of infighting and a tolerance for weakness. He believed the Dark
Side was like venom - the thinner it was spread, the weaker. Thus, to concentrate its power,
he came up with the Rule of Two and founded the Order of the Sith Lords, the final evolution
of the Sith legacy. In the new Order there would be none of the armies, politics, and lesser Sith
that all prior orders had had. There would just be two Sith Lords to plot the Republic’s demise,
a Master and an Apprentice, and a thousand years after the founding of Bane’s order, one
such pair did indeed destroy the Republic. So, that was our look at the various dynasties
of Sith. But what do you think? Which of these orders interested you the most? Feel free
to post your thoughts in the comments below.
