Mandalore, home planet of the Mandalorians, has a complicated history

Din Djarin is in the first episode of In Search of Redemption The Mandalorian Season 3, and that quest leads straight to the Mandalorian home planet of Mandalore. We’ve been to Mandalore in the Star Wars universe (at least in the canon version of it) a few times so far, including in the Star Wars rebels animated series and in flashbacks The Mandalorian. But we still haven’t fully looked at this planet, even in its devastated state, despite the new season of The Mandalorian maybe that can change.

In an interview with Polygon, director and executive producer Rick Famuyiwa explained that Mandalore is incredibly important to this season of the show and many of its biggest action beats will take place.

“The idea of ​​Mandalore, the story around it and the lore and the Great Purge and its impact on this society of people, both what they did in the animated series and what’s implied in the show, was very central,” Famuyiwa said Polygon. “[It has been] Part of the story that hangs above it all and what it all means, especially for those covert Mandalorians that are in hiding. The place now has some context and a kind of pull to the events that are happening.”

With all of its newfound importance to the story, here’s everything you need to know about Mandalore before Din Djarin and Grogu actually arrive.

What exactly is Mandalore?

An ancient planet, Mandalore, along with its moon Concordia and another planet within the system, Kalevala, is the traditional home of the Mandalorian people and culture. Mandalore is also home to beskar, the extremely durable metal that makes up Mandalorian armor and found in only a few select locations in the galaxy. The planet was also formerly home to a giant creature called the Mythosaur, said to have been tamed by a legendary Mandalorian warrior and whose skull is now the Mandalorian’s crest.

Image: Lucasfilm

What about the Mandalorian civil wars?

Besides its precious metals and the warrior habits of its people, Mandalore was also famous for the ferocity of its civil wars. In fact, these wars were so frequent and terrible that most of Mandalore’s surface became inhospitable, forcing people to live mostly in vast domed cities or underground.

Who ruled Mandalore?

In and around all of these civil wars, Mandalore has generally always been ruled by specific family houses, clans, or factions. Among them is the Kryze family, of which Bo-Katan is a part, but there were also others, such as the Shadow Collective, ruled by Darth Maul.

Image: Lucasfilm

What was the Great Purge?

The Mandalorians, unsurprisingly for a proud and traditional warrior race, were highly resilient to the attempted takeover by the Galactic Empire. So much so that they repelled many Imperial attacks before the galaxy’s new overlords grew tired of the resistance and simply decided to wipe out Mandalore (or get close to it) instead. To that end, during a bombing campaign known as the Night of a Thousand Tears, the Empire conducted what the Mandalorians now know as the Great Purge, a massive genocide that ravaged the entire surface of the planet with heat, and transformed that most of it in glass and crystal – thus completing the work of destroying the planet that the Mandalorians themselves had been doing by mistake for hundreds of years.

This event more or less ended Mandalore’s time as one of the largest and most powerful planets in the galaxy.