In response to the Republic’s victory at Bothawhui four years prior, the Sith emperor unveiled his next strategy in the Great Galactic war: recruitment of the Mandalorians.
In a plot similar to The Great White Hype, Imperial Intelligence managed to rig the gladiatorial circuit, and orchestrated the rise of a new Mandalore for the purposes of uniting the Mandalorian diaspora, and brining the Mandalorians under the banner of the Sith Empire.
Singling out a young and proud warrior making a name for himself in the gladiator arena, Imperial agents selected this young warrior to be their new pawn. They drugged his opponents or otherwise rigged his fights in order for him to become the new gladiatorial champion. Then they planted the seed among fans and itinerant Mandalorian bounty hunters that this new champion was himself the new Mandalore. The scattered Mandalorian tribes united under this promising new leader’s flag, and followed the Sith Empire into war with the Republic.
Before long, the Mandalorians had set up a blockade of Coruscant, starving out the Republic. But a tragic fate also awaited the newly crowned warrior king of the Mandalorian tribes. Another Mandalorian quickly killed the new Mandalore set up by Imperial agents, and this new leader took his place. As Master Gnost-Dural says: “Whether or not he’s another Imperial puppet remains to be seen. We must watch him closely”.
This source of Star Wars history highlights a few things of curiosity for me. Firstly, I find admirable this new change of course by the Sith emperor, not in its nobility, but in its cunning. Realizing the push into the core would be a long one, he knew he would have to make some alliances along the way when he began to see the Sith were not going to run roughshod over the Republic. The way he does it is of course completely Sith in nature: not asking for help, but manipulating the Mandalorians into assisting his plans for galactic domination. That being said however, this indicates that the Sith emperor is not just ‘crazy evil’, or too hung-up on the idea that the Sith empire can ‘go it alone’, but it demonstrates that he’s in touch with reality, in a marginal way, knowing it’ll take more than an army of Sith to conquer the galaxy.
The second aspect of this source I found interesting was this character of the “New Mandalore”, the one not set up by Imperial agents. I quickly thought that this ‘real’ Mandalore might be none other than Canderous Oro – the Mandalore from 3951 BBY. But I also remember Canderous, at the end of KOTOR II, saying something like he could never see the Mandalorians working alongside the Sith again, knowing that the Sith would most likely turn on them as soon as the dust from whatever conflict the went into together settled. He thought Mandalorian culture had a better chance of surviving under the Republic rather than the Empire. So taking this into consideration, this “New Mandalore” might, in fact, be a original force to be reckoned with.
For my next post I’ll be looking at a short story titled Smuggler’s Vanguard from starwars.com. Until then my friends, may the Force be with you.
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