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The Second Founding (occurring around early M31) is the most significant military restructuring in Imperium history. Following the Horus Heresy, Primarch Roboute Guilliman authored the Codex Astartes to prevent any single individual from ever wielding the apocalyptic power of an entire Space Marine Legion again. His solution was to permanently dissolve the massive Legions—which previously boasted tens of thousands of Astartes—and break them down into smaller, autonomous military units known as Chapters.
Under this new decree, each Chapter was strictly limited to a maximum strength of 1.000 Battle-Brothers. One core segment of the original Legion would retain the ancestral name, homeworld, and original heraldry (known as the First Founding Chapter, such as the Ultramarines or Imperial Fists). The remaining Astartes were split into newly created independent forces called Successor Chapters (such as the Crimson Fists, Black Templars, or Flesh Tearers). Each Successor Chapter adopted its own distinctive armor color scheme, custom iconography, and home planet or fleet-based crusading domain.
This restructuring sparked intense political and emotional turmoil among the surviving Primarchs. Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists and Leman Russ of the Space Wolves initially perceived this mandate as a profound insult to their loyalty and a dangerous fracturing of the Emperor's finest forces. The disagreement grew so severe that the Imperium stood on the catastrophic brink of a second civil war. However, to preserve fragile galactic peace, Dorn eventually relented after a grueling trial of penance in the Iron Cage, choosing to split his Legion into dynamic Successor Chapters. Leman Russ also accepted the decree, though the Space Wolves practically bypassed the restriction due to their unique genetic flaws, forming only one short-lived successor.
Ultimately, the Second Founding fundamentally transformed the Space Marines from massive, sweeping armies of conquest into elite, highly flexible, and decentralized rapid-response force packages. While it successfully safeguarded the Imperium against another massive Legion-scale rebellion, it also fundamentally decentralized humankind's greatest warriors, reshaping the military landscape of the Warhammer 40K universe for the next ten millennia.