All the Emperors in Dune

I’m sure to be an honorary Bene Gesserit after the type of research I did in the last few weeks - spending way more time than I planned on the imperial lineage.

I knew the original books only mentioned Shaddam and his dad, and I remembered that the Brian Herbert books had maybe a dozen across just as many books. So I thought hey, this is gonna be an easy topic to research, I’ll just mix in whatever’s in the Dune Encyclopedia.

Guess how many I found there.

The end result would make a conspiracy theorist proud - string connections and color-coded annotations, spanning close to 400 named characters and 13,500 years of galactic history.

So grab your spice coffee and settle in. This is going to be a wild ride through the most convoluted family tree in science fiction.

SPOILER WARNING: CONTENT FROM ALL DUNE BOOKS

Before we dive into the imperial politics, we need to talk about Dune’s canons.

Well before the MCU introduced the world to the multiverse, Dune fans had to contend with multiple timelines and parallel universes. There’s no single continuity - we have the core canon, the Dune Encyclopedia and the Expanded Universe.

And while they’ll agree on sandworms, spice coffee and muad’dib (the mouse, not the person), there’s plenty of discrepancies and even contradictions.

Among these: the history of House Corrino.

In the Core Canon - the six original novels by Frank Herbert - Shaddam IV is identified as 81st of his line. Then we get his dad, Elrood IX (logically, the 80th), Paul Muad'Dib, and Leto II, and that's it. Four emperors, with the last one hogging 3,500 years of the timeline. And the only thing we can deduce is that there were another 3x Shaddams and 8x Elroods - and so they and the other 68 emperors somehow ruled for 10 millennia (?)

Then there's the Dune Encyclopedia - the massive, Frank Herbert-approved fan fiction that ends with Leto II and starts 88 years before the Guild. I completely forgot that it actually provides the complete timeline, numbering each emperor and getting to 374. But here’s the fun bit: when I went through the list line by line, trying to construct the family tree you’ll find below, I actually found 376 names. The encyclopedists messed up the count. Twice. Yes, really.

Finally, we have the Expanded Universe - the books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. These introduce a completely different timeline with new names and histories, but only give us a handful of emperors from the dawn of the Imperium, along with scattered mentions of others.

All three canons agree on Shaddam, Paul, and Leto - it would be weird if anyone dared to contradict the core canon. But that’s the only thing they agree on - even Elrood’s reign isn’t the same. And when it comes to the ten thousand years before Muad’Dib, things get complicated.

If Shaddam IV is the 81st of his line (as stated in the original Dune), the average reign of each emperor would need to be about 125 years. Spice extends life, but it doesn’t provide political stability. Or does that mean there were other lines before the Corrinos? Was there a galactic republic? Who knows what Herbert intended?

The Encyclopedia’s history of its 376 rulers provides a much more realistic view, full with political (and physical) backstabbing and feuds for the throne, but to do so, it needs to completely disregards Frank Herbert’s established lore:

Here, you can count it out yourself:

(I suggest clicking on the image and downloading it so you can zoom in properly.)

What you're looking at is the family tree of all mentioned emperors across the three canons, with their relationships and reign dates.

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