First Founding
- "They shall be my finest warriors, these men who give of themselves to me. Like clay I shall mould them, and in the furnace of war forge them. They will be of iron will and steely muscle. In great armour shall I clad them and with the mightiest guns will they be armed. They will be untouched by plague or disease, no sickness will blight them. They will have tactics, strategies and machines so that no foe can best them in battle. They are my bulwark against the Terror. They are the Defenders of Humanity. They are my Space Marines and they shall know no fear."
- --The Emperor of Mankind on the creation of the Adeptus Astartes
After he conquered Terra, the Emperor of Mankind set out on a Great Crusade to re-unite the lost human colonies into a mighty Imperium. He soon realized that bog-standard humans wouldn't be enough; some situations called for a small number of devastatingly powerful warriors, a surgical strike force to smash enemy linchpins. To fill this role, he created his Primarchs, and from their genes, he created the Legiones Astartes, the twenty Space Marine Legions:
| Legion Number | Primarch | Homeworld | Name of the Legion | Allegiance | |
| I | Lion El'Jonson | Caliban | Dark Angels | ABSOLUTELY LOYAL, AND HAVE TOTALLY NEVER BEEN TRAITORS AT ANY POINT. PLEASE FOLLOW ME DOWN THIS ENTIRELY SAFE AND UNSUSPICIOUS DARK ALLEY SO THAT I MAY EDUCATE YOU ON THE TOTALLY CLEAN AND LOYALIST HISTORY OF THE DARK ANGELS! | |
| II | +++Records expunged+++ | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| III | Fulgrim | Chemos | Emperor's Children | Traitor | |
| IV | Perturabo | Olympia | Iron Warriors | Traitor | |
| V | Jaghatai Khan | Chogoris/Mundus Planus | White Scars | Loyal | |
| VI | Leman Russ | Fenris | Space Wolves | ruff ruff Loyal ruffl | |
| VII | Rogal Dorn | Terra, Inwit | Imperial Fists | MEGA | |
| VIII | Konrad Curze | Nostramo | Night Lords | Spooky traitor | |
| IX | Sanguinius | Baal | Blood Angels | Loyal | |
| X | Ferrus Manus | Medusa | Iron Hands | Loyal | |
| XI | +++Records expunged+++ | ||||
| XII | Angron | Nuceria, Bodt | World Eaters | Traitor | |
| XIII | Roboute Guilliman | Macragge | Ultramarines | SUPER DUPER Loyal | |
| XIV | Mortarion | Barbarus | Death Guard | Traitor | |
| XV | Magnus the Red | Prospero | Thousand Sons | Traitor (though they never asked for this) | |
| XVI | Horus Lupercal | Cthonia | Luna Wolves/Sons of Horus | UBER Traitor | |
| XVII | Lorgar Aurelian | Colchis | Word Bearers | Double Traitor | |
| XVIII | Vulkan | Nocturne | Salamanders | Loyal | |
| XIX | Corvus Corax | Deliverance | Raven Guard | Loyal | |
| XX | Alpharius Omegon | Unknown | Alpha Legion | It's complicated, even they might not know at this point | |
Organization
The Legio Astartes, being far larger than current Space Marine Chapters, were organized along drastically different lines. At the head of the Legion was its Primarch Commander who oversaw the Legion's headquarters. Below this were the Chapters of the Legion, each of which was commanded by a Lord Commander. Each Chapter in turn was divided into a number of Battalions led by a Lieutenant Commander. Each battalion was then further divided into Companies led by a Captain. The Company, itself divided into a number of Squads, was the basic military division of the Legio Astartes. Due to the varying sizes of each Legion and the varying nature of supply and attrition, there was no fixed number of how many Chapters, Battalions, Companies, and Squads a Legion would contain. But even then, there was no fixed institution that a particular Company should be composed of certain units, with each Company specialising naturally as marines and officers became veterans of a certain form of warfare.
Number of Legionaries
The Legions were massive armies, and the size of each could vary tremendously. A precise number was never truly achieved and maintained. Even during the Great Crusade, some Legions were very numerous, while others were not. The numbers would always vary with new recruits and inevitable battle-losses, and also important was the availability of potential recruits and the administrative skills of the Primarch and his officers.
However the closest thing to a 'standard' legion is what the Emperor started with which was 10 chapters to a legion, 2 battalions to a chapter, five companies to a battalion and 100 marines to a company
The most numerous Legion of all was the Ultramarines. The Thousand Sons of Magnus were of a small number as many of them had developed mutations or uncontrollable levels of psychic powers. Fulgrim's samples had been largely lost, and this left the Legion of the Emperor's Children also with a very small number. Both of these Legions would increase their numbers to acceptable standards only after their Primarchs were found.
The approximate sizes of a few of the Legions at the start of the Heresy have been given in various sources (it should be noted that originally these numbers were much smaller, a full zero knocked off until they were upped by the BL/Forgeworld writers):
- Dark Angels - 216,000 and possibly even more
- Emperor's Children - 110,000
- Iron Warriors - 150,000 to 180,000 but could have been more, if not for them regularly taking horrific casualties.
- Space Wolves - 95,000 to 100,000
- Imperial Fists - 100,000
- Night Lords - Officially 90,000 to 120,000 but actually close to the larger Legions
- Blood Angels - 120,000
- Iron Hands - In excess of 113,000
- World Eaters - 150,000
- Ultramarines - 250,000
- Death Guard - 95,000
- Thousand Sons - 10,000 but some sources say the Raven Guard was the smallest, so who knows.
- Sons of Horus - 130,000 to 170,000
- Word Bearers - 180,000 to 250,000
- Salamanders - 89,000
- Raven Guard - 80,000
- Alpha Legion - 90,000 to 130,000 to 180,000 and possibly even more. No-one knows for sure.
These estimations are the Legions at the closing of the Great Crusade, though it would be a mistake to assume that the number was final and only went down during the Horus Heresy. Many of the Legions were still recruiting at an accelerated rate and the number actually went up.
It's also a mistake to assume that the Traitor Legions went turncoat en-masse, when in fact the Loyalist elements of those Legions counted for a significant portion of their strength. Approximately 100,000 loyalist Legionaries were purged at Isstvan III, practically counting for a Legion sized force to themselves. Their destruction came at a great cost to the Traitor Legions mustered there and Horus would enter the war with his strength greatly reduced. While rare, there were also a few members of loyalist Legions who sided with the traitors as well- the Dark Angels and White Scars in particular were very nearly torn apart by the resulting infighting.
Horus Heresy
For all their power, the Space Marines and Primarchs were not perfect; half of them were sufficiently flawed to be tempted by (or driven to) Chaos, led by Warmaster Horus. The traitors were defeated, but at a terrible cost, including the near-death of the God-Emperor of Mankind and trillions of deaths.
Roboute Guilliman decided that the so-called Horus Heresy was proof that one man could not be trusted with power over one-twentieth of the Imperial Armed Forces, so he enacted several reforms to divide the Imperial Army into the Imperial Guard and Navy, and split the remaining loyalist Legions into Chapters, in accordance with his Codex Astartes. This event was later known as the Second Founding.
Legions in 40k
Technically all of the Chaos Marines are still 'legions', at least in name. They never split into chapters so legions they technically remain. However, since they are all split up into roving warbands and there is no central control it's hard to say they really count anymore. Perhaps most importantly it's impossible to guess how many dudes there are even technically in any legions pool. When they aren't fighting the Imperium, they are fighting each other, and since none of the Black Crusades have been successful we can reasonably assume that marines aren't pouring out of the Eye of Terror in their hundreds of thousands. It's utterly impossible to guess how many dudes they got. They got some. Probably not that many. Definitely many many many less than they arrived at the Eye with, which was obviously rather fewer than they began the war with.
As for the loyalists... Since the introduction of the Codex Astartes, there are obviously no longer any Space Marine legions though that does not stop certain chapters from being described or implied to be at "Legion Strength". Though this is often a common Neckbeard error and sometimes even gets used in the fluff, where the term is mistakenly used to describe any significantly oversized chapter, though even then they never compare to the forces from the Great Crusade. Though some make a good attempt at it:
- Black Templars are obviously over-strength in multiples of 1000 and keep to the spirit of the Great Crusade unlike any other chapter. This force is made up of three primary crusade fleets of unknown size which can end up spread over up to thirty engagements, where the size of a force could be as large as "nearly" chapter strength (but not over for obvious reasons) or as small as a single ship and a handful of squads, so can be averaged at around chapter strength for each primary fleet. This arrangement is meant to be fluid, and changes all the time as fleets merge and disperse. Respectable figures put their numbers between 2000-6000, though recent comments by Black Library/Games Workshop writers seem to retcon this to just over 1000 and there being only three crusades of fewer than 500 Black Templars at any one time.
- Space Wolves make no secret of the fact they ignore the Codex Astartes, but even then they are no-where near their original size. In M32 during the Battle of the Fang it is remarked that most of The Aett is actually abandoned. Furthermore, Logan Grimnar's own Great Company numbers 200 marines prior to the Sanctus Reach campaign and is the largest company on its own (i.e.: not including the chapter assets). Their current number was originally between 1200-3000, but following the Siege of Fenris it is almost certainly much smaller.
- Astral Claws were actually accused of Legion building and declared heretics even when they were not yet followers of Chaos, their number at the time of the Badab War was around 3000, though they never even used that number as a single force and spread themselves throughout their PDF forces
- The Unforgiven are most likely one of the closest examples of a true Legion in that each of the successor chapters arrange themselves under one secret command structure (the Inner Circle). Though they each obey the spirit, if not the letter of the Codex Astartes and maintain mostly standard chapters of ten companies. The combined numbers of Dark Angel's successors would put them at around 150,000 marines, and this is just a rough estimate, though we don't know if all of the Dark Angel's successors actually consider themselves part of the Unforgiven. Some definitely do though. Oh yes indeed. The Inner Circle has been known to send a random successor chapter across the galaxy to do the space marine equivalent of getting them a six pack (of traitors) when the main chapter is too busy.
- Ultramarines - Ironically, the ones who uphold the Codex Astartes most strictly are the most hypocritical when it comes to deviations from it. The 23 Second Founding chapters of the Ultramarines are all represented in the senate of Ultramar and look to the Lord of Macragge as their nominal leader. The Ultramarines even keep a SPARE chapter lying around to replenish their own ranks whenever they suffer terrible casualties. Also if certain people had their way then EVERY chapter would answer when the Ultramarines snap their fingers. Because the Ultramarines account for nearly half of the later-founded chapters in the Imperium, they would amount to around 500,000 marines.
- Then again... The thing is that all of the original legions maintain ties with with their subsequent founding chapters. Blood Angels occasionally call all their bros together, and last time they did everyone out to the 23rd founding showed up for blood and pancakes. Every now and again every Dorn-descended chapter sends a champion (and his mustache) to a big fighting contest to see who is the Dorniest. Essentially every Legion that wasn't murdered into damn near extinction (i.e. had enough marines to have many descendants) maintains some tie between them. Ultramar spanned FIVE HUNDRED worlds. That's a lot of worlds. And all of them were tithed to the Ultramarines. Guilliman wanted his boys to be warrior-kings. That meant that he gave worlds to be run by marines, and in the end his ideal was each chapter master and senior captain would be master of a world too and look out for it's population. Sooo... 500 worlds -> 500,000 marines, 1 modern chapter per world, not exactly shocking when you say it like that.
- "The Last Wall" As it turned out, Dorn didn't fully break up his Legion, every Son of Dorn chapter has a secret plan that if the main Chapter were to ever call every successor chapter will unite as a full Legion again. This plan not only saved Terra from one of the worst post-heresy conflicts yet, but also rescued the Imperial Fists from actual extinction.
Two Unknown Legions
In the First Edition of Warhammer 40,000, the twenty First Founding Chapters were all known. It seems that Games Workshop had more love for some than others; when they made fluff revisions in the transition to Second Edition, the Valedictors and Rainbow Warriors were demoted to one of the "Later Foundings."
Nowadays, nothing concrete is known about the Legions II and XI, and likewise their unknown Primarchs. Officially, the Imperium deleted all records regarding the "Lost Legions"; the only reminder of the two legions were empty plinths in the Hegemon where statues of the Primarchs stood at the Imperial Palace. Throughout the Horus Heresy series, it is suggested that the Space Wolves destroyed them for some reason. The Horus Heresy: Massacre includes a timeline of the events at the end of the Great Crusade, and in 965 and 969.M30, the Space Wolves engaged in two missions from which all data was redacted. In the book The First Heretic, when a daemon takes the Word Bearers on a trip back in time to show them the creation of the Primarchs, the Word Bearers dialogue indicates that the XI Legion in particular did something bad enough for the Emperor to lead their purge himself. In the book Fear To Tread, Sanguinius tells Horus that he hasn't revealed the existence of the Red Thirst to the Emperor because he fears that the Blood Angels would be purged as well, indicating that gene-seed flaws may have also been a factor. Deliverance Lost has a dialogue between taking place during Corax's first meeting with the Emperor where he asks why only sixteen of his brothers were waiting to meet him if he was the nineteenth Primarch to be found, only for the Emperor to deflect the question; consequently, we can assume that the Legions were purged sometime before Corax's discovery (and were never around for the Horus Heresy). He also forced the remaining Primarchs to swear an oath never to speak of their absent brothers, so whatever they did must have been extraordinarily bad. In Legion, a ship's captain notes that the naughtiness of the Alpha Legion isn't the first time that a Legion has "overstepped it's mark" and that the Imperial Army fleet should report the Alpha Legion "before they become too powerful," which might imply that one of the Legions got away with naughtiness for a long time and then used their entire Legion to fight the Emperor. 'Horus Heresy Book 3: Extermination also hints at the fate of the two missing Legions, first hinting that one Legion did not pass the "Alpha" intake (to take them up to Legion-Strength) when going through testing and the other saying that "the disaster of [REDACTED] had proven the folly of attempting to recruit Legiones Astartes stock from potentially tainted sources." These could be in reference to the same Legion (using tainted stock in the Alpha intake) or two separate ones, with Legion A fucking up in the Alpha intake and Legion B using tainted stock in the later Great Crusade.
Since Horus and the other traitor Primarchs managed to keep their records un-expunged during the Horus Heresy (and afterwards, since the Space Wolves clearly know who Magnus is, the Grey Knights clearly know who Mortarion is, and Horus' name seems to have become a swearword), it can be assumed the missing Legions' naughtiness was something even worse. Possibly they refused to wear pauldrons, we don't know.
Or there may simply be no missing Legions. According to a source who allegedly worked for Games Workshop for five years (seen here), Rick Priestley (who helped write the first Rogue Trader) read about the Roman notion of Damnatio Memoriae, and simply threw in the idea of two "missing" Space Marine Legions as a "nod" to Imperial Rome (specifically, the three Roman legions whose numbers (XVII, XVIII and XIX) were never used after they were wiped out in the disastrous Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. So, nothing significant can ever be revealed about them, because they never really existed in the first place. Except they totally existed in the current canon, even if they started as a joke. Also, the real reason that they were kept around between Rogue Trader and recent revelations was so that people could make up their own pair of Primarchs for model painting and personal fanon (although this has lost its effect as doing so is synonymous with making them Mary Sues).