Second Illumination

The Second Illumination was a series of sweeping territorial, political and military reforms accompanied by numerous reunification campaigns that the Covenant underwent circa the 17th-19th centuries of the Gregorian calendar. It ended both the interregnum known as the Long Discord and the overall Feudal Period of Covenant history, ushering in the Consolidation Period and the last "golden ages" of High Charity's power. Much like the First Illumination before it, the Second Illumination consolidated power back under High Charity where it had lapsed to the hands of the Covenant's regional Sangheili aristocracy, particularly the eclectic class of "marcher lords" who experienced their peak in the preceding centuries. Throughout the Covenant's Late Antiquity, the marcher lords amassed power and wealth by launching (with the holy city's blessing and encouragement) massive campaigns to settle and civilize the Covenant's frontier regions, or marches. But with the passing of generations, many of the marcher lords' loyalties to High Charity lapsed, threatening the very fabric of the Covenant as a hegemonic empire.

The Second Illumination lasted for ages, and its effects on the Covenant were still felt by the 9th Age of Reclamation. Some have gone so far as to argue that the event planted the first seeds that would eventually blossom into the Great Schism.

History
By the advent of the second millennium CE, the Covenant was descending into a time of more diffuse power balance, a development known among some historians as the Feudal Era Dispersion. There were many consecutive ages with a weak or internally contentious High Council and Hierarch triumvirate, whereas regional lordships and feuding Ministries held more power in their respective domains and reliquaries, and over the banners under their immediate power. Most historians attribute this to the Covenant's overextension in prior ages, with High Charity having sponsored grand expansion campaigns without considering their long-term implications.

Over many ages, the High Council's reach grew weak in the outer territories, and their credibility eroded as they mostly looked inward, to the internal squabbles of High Charity and the old core regions of the Covenant and the interests of the worlds therein. Numerous ideas that would have immediately been stamped out as heresies in a time of more powerful central authority festered across thousands of worlds in the marches, and these ideas had the backing of both many powerful lords and their subjects. And those far-flung populations began to develop the idea that they might be better off without being ordered around by High Charity, whose bureaucracy was bloated, impotent, and mostly cared for faraway worlds anyway. The non-standardized, ineffective communication systems used by many worlds at the time did not help; oftentimes High Charity lacked the means of directly contacting the marcher lords, often requiring couriers to reliably get messages across.

An important note is that most of these breakaway movements were not secular: many were indeed backed by or even synonymous with regional churches, though oftentimes their leaders did have prominent political goals. These offshoot denominations often had a reformist bent to them, seeking to restore the Covenant faith to its original, pure state, which they saw as having been forgotten by the High Charity ecclesiarchy. And though the inherent heresy in this line of thinking would be stamped out decisively and mercilessly in the coming century, many of the underlying ideas of those movements would persist in the background of the religious and political landscape of those domains.

Consequently, hundreds of microwars inflamed across the outer reaches of the Covenant, particularly the spinward- regions of the Covenant's Orion Arm holdings. This was known as the Long Discord, and culminated in a High Council intervention and the deployment of Ministerial fleets, especially those of the recently-empowered Ministry of Preservation. Much blood was spilled and many worlds were made an example of. In the end, the remaining loyal lords of those domains asserted their fealty to the High Prophets of Peace, Humility and Piety within High Charity as it toured the spinward realms to reassert its authority. In truth, the lords had to be appeased as well, for the central authority could not have won without their support. This was in the 19th century of the Gregorian calendar, and it is often said that it was the decoding of the first relics of Zhoist's the Ten Cities of Edification that gave High Charity the edge it needed to emerge victorious.

Meanwhile, what is now known as the Coadunation instituted a formal ecclesiastic authority to govern each region of space. This was the creation of the primary domains, which would act as the Covenant's unified diocesan religio-political structure in the heartlands and the marches alike. Militarily, it drastically increased the power of the Ministerial military forces over local warrior banners; for many ages, the Ministry of Preservation wielded the Covenant's most powerful armada, though in time it would wane and give way to other ministries. This took place even as the last of the civil wars were being stamped out across the empire; though the lords who had sided with the High Council in the war lost little and were in turn rewarded with many of their competitors obliterated off the face of the galaxy; however, it would be many ages before those domains - or the Covenant overall - would truly prosper again. These political changes were supplemented by various efforts at promoting cultural unity across the entire Covenant; for example, new grand festivals and rituals were introduced across the Holy Ecumene to remind the people of the Covenant's common cause.

The Second Illumination also saw the introduction of the Covenant's empire-wide wavecaster network, tying the domain hub worlds both together and to High Charity.