History of the Romulan Star Empire

1. Overview

The Romulan Star Empire is one of the oldest powers the Federation deals with, and one of the least known. Its people descend from Vulcans who left their homeworld about two thousand years ago rather than accept the discipline of logic. They crossed a great distance, settled two worlds they would make the centre of an empire, and for most of their history kept the rest of the galaxy at arm’s length. Humans fought a war against them for four years without once seeing a Romulan face. For most of the two centuries since, the Empire’s relationship with the Federation has been defined by a line in space: the Neutral Zone.

This article tells that history in outline, from the exodus to the present border. It is written from the Federation’s side, because there is no other side available. The Empire publishes no history for outsiders, and what it teaches its own children is known only in fragments. Where the record is thin, this article says so. For exact dates, see Timeline. For the treaties and incidents between the two powers in more detail, see Romulans and the Federation, and for how the Empire is governed today, see Government of the Empire.

2. The Exodus and the Founding

Vulcan in the age before Surak was a violent world. Its peoples were as passionate as they were intelligent, and their wars came close to destroying the planet. Surak taught that the way out was the mastery of emotion through logic, and over time most Vulcans came to accept his teaching. A large group did not. They left Vulcan in the era of Surak’s reforms, which Vulcan tradition calls the Time of Awakening, and Vulcan records describe them as those who marched beneath the raptor’s wings.

How many left, how they travelled, and how long the journey took are not known with any confidence. Vulcan sources say little, and Romulan sources say less to outsiders. What is certain is the result. The travellers settled a pair of worlds a long way from Vulcan, known in the Federation as Romulus and Remus, and built a civilisation there that kept the Vulcan mind and the Vulcan body while rejecting the Vulcan answer to both. Romulans in their own language call themselves the Rihannsu, a word Federation scholars have seen in only a handful of sources.

The settlement of Remus is the part of the founding that matters most now, and it is the part least understood. By the time the Federation had any picture of the Empire at all, Remus was a world of mines and labour, and the Remans were a separate people treated as a servant caste. When and how that division began is not part of any record the Federation holds. See The Remans and Romulus, Remus and the Core Worlds.

3. The Long Unseen Centuries

Almost nothing is known of the Empire’s first fifteen centuries. It grew, it took in other worlds, and it built the institutions that still govern it: a Senate, a Praetor at its head, an officer class for its fleets, and great noble houses whose quarrels and alliances run through every period of its history.

4. The Earth-Romulan War

The Empire’s first known moves against the powers that would form the Federation came in the 2150s, and they were made in secret. In 2154 Romulan agents were found to have penetrated the Vulcan High Command, working toward a Vulcan brought under Romulan influence. In the same year a Romulan drone ship, able to disguise itself as the vessels of other powers, attacked ships of several species in an attempt to set them against each other. Both efforts failed, and the second helped draw Earth, Vulcan, Andoria and Tellar closer together.

Open war with Earth followed. Federation histories date its start to 2156. It was fought with what would now be thought primitive ships and atomic weapons, and it was fought at a distance. No ship’s crew on either side ever saw the enemy on a viewscreen, and no human saw a Romulan face. The war ended in 2160. The peace was arranged by subspace radio, and its central term was the Romulan Neutral Zone: a buffer between the two territories that neither side would enter without it being taken as an act of war.

The United Federation of Planets was established in 2161, the year after the peace, by worlds that had learned in that war what the alternative to cooperation could cost.

5. The Century Behind the Zone (2160 to 2266)

For more than a century after the war the Empire stayed behind its line. Earth built a chain of outposts along the Zone to watch it, and the outposts watched nothing. There was no recorded contact. The Federation came to think of the Romulans as a memory from an earlier age.

That ended in 2266. A Romulan bird-of-prey, armed with a plasma weapon and fitted with a cloaking device, crossed the Zone and destroyed several of the Earth outposts. The USS Enterprise pursued it and, after a long duel, destroyed it. In the course of the engagement the Federation saw a Romulan for the first time, and learned that Romulans looked like Vulcans. The suspicion that the two peoples were related, and the shock of it, date from that day.

The years after brought more contact. By 2268 Starfleet intelligence reported that the Romulans were using Klingon ship designs, a sign of some exchange between the two empires. In the same year the Enterprise took a Romulan cloaking device from a Romulan ship inside the Zone, an operation the Empire has not forgotten. By the 2290s the Empire was again working by indirect means. When the Federation and the Klingon Empire met at Khitomer in 2293 to make peace, a Romulan ambassador, Nanclus, was among the conspirators who tried to stop it.

6. The Tomed Incident and the Long Isolation (2311 to 2364)

In 2311 the two powers clashed in what the Federation calls the Tomed Incident. The Federation has never published a full public account of it. It was followed in the same year by the Treaty of Algeron, which restated the Neutral Zone and its rules, and under which the Federation agreed not to develop or use cloaking technology. See Romulans and the Federation for the treaty.

After Tomed the Empire withdrew from contact with the Federation altogether. For fifty-three years no Romulan diplomat spoke to a Federation one, and the outposts along the Zone recorded nothing. By the 2350s an entire generation of Starfleet officers had never seen a Romulan.

The isolation did not mean the Empire was idle. It meant it was not talking to the Federation. Romulan warbirds attacked the Klingon outpost on Narendra III in 2344, and the USS Enterprise-C was destroyed defending it, a sacrifice the Klingons still honour. In 2346 a Romulan attack on the Klingon colony at Khitomer killed thousands, with the help of a Klingon traitor who gave the Romulans the colony’s defence codes. The Klingons remember both. See The Klingon Empire.

7. The Return (2364 to 2373)

The Empire came back in 2364, and it came back with a warning. Several outposts on both sides of the Zone were found destroyed. Both powers denied responsibility. A Romulan warbird met the USS Enterprise-D at the Zone, and its commander made clear that the Empire was again taking an interest in the galaxy beyond its border. The message was understood on both sides.

The years that followed were full of pressure without open war. Romulan ships crossed the line in pursuit of their own interests, and Federation ships did the same in theirs. In 2366 a Romulan scout crashed on Galorndon Core, on the Federation side of the Zone, and a standoff between a warbird and the Enterprise ended without a shot. In 2367 Romulan agents tried to wreck the Federation-Klingon alliance by programming a Starfleet officer to kill a Klingon governor. In 2367 and 2368 the Empire secretly supplied the House of Duras in the Klingon civil war, and withdrew only when a Federation blockade exposed its convoys. The officer behind much of this was Commander Sela.

In 2368 the Empire went further. Ambassador Spock had come to Romulus to support a movement for reunification with Vulcan. The movement was real, but Proconsul Neral and Commander Sela used it as cover for a plan to land an invasion force on Vulcan in captured Vulcan ships. The plan was exposed and failed. Spock stayed on Romulus to continue the work in secret. See Dissidents, Splinters and Unification.

In 2370 the wreck of the USS Pegasus was recovered near the Zone, and with it proof that Starfleet had once tested a cloaking device in breach of the Treaty of Algeron. The affair ended with the breach admitted in front of a Romulan commander. In 2371 the Empire did something that would have been hard to imagine a decade earlier: it lent the Federation a cloaking device for the USS Defiant, under strict terms, for use in the Gamma Quadrant.

The same year brought the Empire’s worst intelligence disaster. The Tal Shiar joined the Cardassian Obsidian Order in a secret strike on the Founders’ homeworld in the Omarion Nebula. The combined fleet was destroyed in an ambush, and the Tal Shiar officer commanding the Romulan side, Colonel Lovok, turned out to be a Changeling. The Tal Shiar was nearly destroyed. See The Tal Shiar.

8. The Dominion War (2373 to 2375)

When the Dominion moved into the Alpha Quadrant in force in 2373, the Empire signed a non-aggression pact with it and stood aside. That changed in 2374. Senator Vreenak was killed returning from a meeting with Federation officials, and the evidence pointed to the Dominion. The Empire declared war on the Dominion and entered the conflict as an ally of the Federation and the Klingon Empire. It was an alliance of necessity on every side, and every side knew it.

Romulan fleets fought in the major campaigns of the last part of the war, from the first offensive into Cardassian space at Chin’toka to the final battle at Cardassia in 2375. The Remans fought too, used as shock troops in the worst fighting. The alliance was never easy. In 2375 the Empire placed plasma torpedo launchers on Derna, a moon in the Bajoran system, and removed them only after Bajor and the Federation refused to accept them. The same year Senator Cretak, the Empire’s senior representative at Deep Space Nine, was removed from office after the Tal Shiar chairman, Koval, accused her of treason.

The alliance ended with the war. The one exception was the work of clearing the old battlefields. In 2377 the Federation, the Klingon Empire and the Empire set up a joint recovery initiative of twelve ships each, led by the USS Viola, and for most of a decade its crews dismantled derelicts, recovered material and returned the dead to their homeworlds.

9. Shinzon and the Fall of the Senate (2379)

In 2379 the Empire was overthrown from below. Shinzon, a human raised among the Remans and a commander of Reman troops in the Dominion War, took power with Reman forces and the support of part of the Romulan military. His followers killed the Senate in its own chamber with a thalaron weapon. Praetor Hiren died with it. Shinzon declared himself Praetor and invited the Federation to talk peace.

The offer was false. Shinzon meant to attack Earth with his warship, the Scimitar. The USS Enterprise-E fought him in the Bassen Rift, joined by two Romulan warbirds under Commander Donatra, who had turned against him. Shinzon was killed and the Scimitar destroyed. Donatra offered the Federation the Empire’s thanks, and for a short time it seemed that a new relationship might follow.

It did not. The Empire had lost its Senate, its Praetor and much of its governing class in a single day, and the man who had killed them was dead too. There was no one left with the authority to speak for the Empire.

10. The Silence (2379 to 2382)

Romulans call the years that followed the Silence. From 2379 to 2382 there was no Senate. The surviving noble houses and the provincial governors ran their own provinces as they saw fit, and several of them made claims to rule the whole. What held the Empire together was the Imperial Fleet, which refused to take a side. It kept its ships on station, guarded the borders and the core worlds, and did not lend its strength to any claimant. No faction could win by force, and so in the end they had to agree.

The Empire showed the Federation almost nothing of this. Contact along the Zone fell away. Federation observers saw fewer patrols and heard less traffic, and learned more from what was missing than from anything the Empire said. One act of the period reached the outside world: a law of 2381 that declared the Remans “subjects of the Empire under protection”. It changed little on Remus. See The Remans.

11. The Restored Senate and the Inward Years (2382 to 2389)

The Restored Senate first sat in 2382. It was rebuilt from the surviving noble houses and the provincial governors, it is smaller than the Senate that died in 2379, and it is more afraid of the Empire’s own security services. Its first Praetor was Sorrel t’Keleth, who held the office from 2382 to 2389.

T’Keleth’s praetorship looked inward. The Empire’s business in those years was its own repair: settling the houses, binding the provinces back to the centre, and rebuilding what the coup had broken. The Tal Shiar went on rebuilding too, smaller, younger and more technical than the service lost at Omarion. Its chair has not been publicly named since 2384.

The inward years were not quiet ones inside the Empire. In the 2380s a Romulan sect calling itself the Lyreth Shiar, “the True Empire”, grew far faster than any such movement should have. It was later found to have been secretly allied with the Breen, who helped it gain power and territory. After several years it was dismantled from within. The details have never been made public. See Dissidents, Splinters and Unification.

12. The Return to the Zone (2387 to 2393)

The first patrols came back to the line in 2387, in the last years of t’Keleth’s praetorship, and the Tal Shiar came with them. Sorrel t’Keleth stepped down in 2389, and Ardhal tr’Vesuin became Praetor. Tr’Vesuin made the return to the Zone the policy of the state and sent the patrols back in strength. His praetorship is the one Romulans and Federation officers alike associate with the hard border of today. His chief voice in the Senate is Proconsul Mevrek tr’Annai.

The Remans gave the new posture its sharpest test. In the system of T’Met, just outside the Romulan border, Reman settlers declared independence as the T’Met Republic under a Caliph. The Empire tried first to talk T’Met back in. In 2391 it is believed to have used biogenic weapons on T’Met’s people, and tens of thousands died. T’Met asked the Federation for help, Starfleet sent relief, and the USS Ragnarok worked to settle the region before moving on. In 2392 T’Met was admitted to the Federation. To most Romulans this is an affront, and the region has grown less stable every year since. See T'Met, and for the Ragnarok’s dealings with the Empire and the Remans, The USS Ragnarok and the Romulans.

By 2393 the Zone is a hard border in every sense but the official one. The listening posts on both sides are manned again, sensor buoys line both sides, and cloaked warbirds patrol ground they insist they never enter. The Empire across the line has buried a Senate, survived a coup, and rebuilt itself on its oldest instincts: watchful, insular and patient. For the line as it stands now, see The Neutral Zone (2393) and The Romulan Side of the Zone.

13. The Eras at a Glance

14. Reading Romulan History

Most of this history is seen from outside, through the moments when the Empire’s story touched the Federation’s, and the long stretches between are close to blank. The Empire admits little, and Romulans treat the past as part of a house’s claim on the present. What runs through the whole record is patience: an Empire that can go silent for a century and come back as if nothing had changed.

15. See Also

The Romulan Star Empire · Timeline · Romulans and the Federation · Government of the Empire · The Tal Shiar · The Remans · Dissidents, Splinters and Unification · The Neutral Zone (2393)