Billions of years ago, great races walked like giants among the stars, vast and timeless,
before relinquishing their stewardship of the galaxy and transcending beyond the Rim
and into legend.
When the elder races departed to make way for the new, the first to assume this mantle
of responsibility was the Minbari.
The oldest of the Younger Races, the Minbari have long been a formidable power in the galaxy.
They achieved interstellar travel over a thousand years
before all other races.
This place of technological and cultural superiority led to the Minbari adopting a paternalistic
attitude - which is often considered arrogant by outsiders.
The Minbari are a bipedal race from the planet Minbar, capable of living a hundred and twenty
Earth years or longer.
They are easily distinguished by their ornate and unique crests that grow around their heads.
Spiritual, ritualistic, and disciplined, the Minbari are taught to value the lives of others
above their own, and to serve with honor, dignity, and honesty - though it is said by
other races that Minbari never tell the whole truth.
Minbari culture is centered around an ancient social structure that divides its population
between Religious, Warrior, and Worker castes.
While caste membership is largely hereditary, Minbari are free to move between them, referred
to as a “Calling of the Heart”.
Already a deeply spiritual people, the Religious Caste is regarded as the most important among
them, with religious and spiritual matters taking precedence.
Its members are responsible for the political, diplomatic, and religious aspects of their
culture and are often found in positions of power or authority.
The cornerstone of their religion is the belief that the universe is alive and conscious,
and has broken itself into many different forms of sentient life to better understand
itself.
It is believed that when a Minbari dies, their spirit joins the souls of all the other Minbari
before them, before finally being reborn into the next generation.
Yet despite the importance of spiritualism within Minbari culture, the goals of the Religious
Caste have often conflicted with those of the Warrior Caste.
Responsible for the protection of Minbar and the Federation, the Warrior Caste is fiercely
loyal, patriotic, nationalistic, and isolationist.
Members of the Warrior caste train for years, dedicating themselves to the study and the
art of war and combat, including specialization in the fighting pike, a traditional Minbari
melee weapon.
Warriors are expected to sacrifice themselves for Minbar if the cause is great enough, and
great leaders who die in battle are treated with immense respect and are revered for generations.
Providing the support and infrastructure of the Minbari Federation is the Worker caste:
the pilots, scientists, engineers, farmers, miners, and other workers of commerce and
industry within the Federation.
This group often takes a backseat to the politics between the warrior and religious castes,
rarely having much power despite being the largest of the three groups.
The highest ruling body of the Minbari Federation is known as the Grey Council, made up of nine
representatives, each granted the honorific title of Satai.
The Council is made up of three members of each caste, representing the major clans within them
By tradition, the group lives apart from Minbari society, meeting aboard the Sharlin-class
Warcruiser Valen’Tha rather than their home planet.
The council is lead by a Chosen One who acts as Speaker, organizing the discussions and
agendas and accepting guest speakers and presenters to the council, but does not take part in
any vote.
Prior to the formation of the Federation and the Grey Council, Castes would compete for
dominance through a device known as the Starfire Wheel, in which prospective leaders were forced
to undergo a torturous barrage of stellar radiation, symbolically suffering for their
people.
During times of crisis, when the Minbari people were asked to endure a difficult or controversial
decision, a victorious leader might voluntarily remain in the wheel, sacrificing themselves
so their words might carry more weight.
The Starfire Wheel largely ended the civil wars and factional violence that had plagued
the Minbari people in their earliest history and brought forth a new era in which they
colonised the stars using the remnants of the ancient jumpgate network.
The first great challenge to the interstellar Minbari civilization arose a millennium ago
when a dark and ancient threat appeared from the edge of known space.
The Minbari joined forces with the Vorlons, an ancient race that had, generations earlier,
gifted select Minbari with psionic abilities.
This threat, known only as The Shadows, had been at war with the Vorlons for an indeterminate
amount of time before the involvement of the Younger Races, and threatened chaos and galaxy
wide destruction.
The Minbari sustained heavy losses during the war, including the destruction of the
main Minbari base of operations.
On the verge of defeat, a strange replacement battlestation appeared, seemingly from nowhere.
After boarding the station, they found a Minbari surrounded by Vorlons in angelic form.
This was Valen, known as the Minbari not born of Minbari.
This legendary figure would unite the Minbari castes, form the Grey Council, and create
an elite group of warriors known as the Anla’Shok or “Rangers”.
These Rangers combined all the knowledge of every warrior clan to make an ultimate fighting
force that helped throw the Shadows back.
Valen knew the Shadow threat was not over, however, and tasked the Anla’Shok with watching
and gathering information for the return of the Shadows in a thousand years.
By Earth year 2245, the Grey Council was led by Chosen One Dukhat, considered one of the
greatest leaders of the Minbari since Valen himself.
On a routine mission to investigate the Rim for evidence of the Shadows return,
Dukhat’s fleet encountered several Earthforce ships.
Following Minbari custom, they approached the humans with open gunports, which the humans
mistook as a threat rather than the Minbari sign of respect it was intended to be.
The commander of the fleet, Captain Michael Jankowski, fired upon the Minbari cruisers
and severely damaged the Valen’Tha, killing Dukhat.
The Grey Council, shocked at the human’s capacity for savagery, sought vengeance against
the Earth Alliance sparking the bloody Earth-Minbari war.
The Minbari Federation far out-classed the Earth Alliance technologically, but were unprepared
for the asymmetric warfare undertaken by EarthForce.
This was exemplified in 2247 when the Minbari’s most powerful Sharlin cruiser, the Drala Fi,
also known as the Black Star, was destroyed by a seemingly crippled EarthForce warship.
Driven by fear, the Minbari embarked on a holy crusade to exterminate humanity and the
threat it posed, sending a strike force to attack Earth itself from orbit.
In the famous Battle of the Line, Earth’s remaining defences were quickly crippled but
just as the Minbari had arrived at their moment of victory, they suddenly and unexpectedly surrendered.
The surrender shocked both humanity and the Minbari alike and many within the Warrior
caste refused to follow the order and instead committed suicide.
This would lead to a growing divide between the Minbari Religious and Warrior Castes.
Why the Minbari surrendered mere hours away from victory remained a closely guarded secret
of the Grey Council, but was believed to have been connected to the capture of Jeffrey Sinclair,
a Starfury squadron leader captured and interrogated during the battle.
With the goal of preventing another full-scale war between races, The Babylon Project was
started by EarthForce as a neutral meeting place where races could settle their differences
peacefully.
After the destruction of the first three stations, and the disappearance of the fourth just twenty
four hours of its completion, the Babylon 5 station finally came online on March 9th,
2256, with significant financial help from the Centauri Republic and the Minbari Federation.
The Minbari’s involvement in the project gave them veto power over the commander of
the station, and Jeffrey Sinclair was approved as the first commanding officer of Babylon 5.
On Minbar, the rivalry between the Warrior and Religious caste grew steadily worse,
and even as evidence was uncovered that the Shadows were beginning to return, the Federation began
to splinter.
In an unprecedented act, a warrior assumed control of a seat on the Grey Council intended
for the Religious caste and the council was disbanded shortly after.
Even as the Rangers and the Army of Light fought against the renewed Shadow Threat,
the Minbari remained divided.
While the Religious and Worker castes would participate in some of the greatest battles
of the Second Shadow War, the Warrior Caste remained largely uninvolved.
With the defeat of the Shadows, the tenuous peace between the castes finally broke.
This new civil war threatened to tear the Federation apart until Satai Delenn of Mir,
ambassador to Babylon 5 and prominent member of the Religious caste, challenged her counterpart,
Shakiri from the Warrior Caste, to step inside the ancient Starfire Wheel.
In the ensuing struggle, Delenn was declared the victor but soon revealed she intended
to remain within the Wheel until death.
Her sacrifice inspired the members of each caste leading to Neroon, a member of a prominent
warrior clan, to die in her place.
With the integrity of the Minbari Federation restored, a new Grey Council was formed around
the long downtrodden and ignored Worker Caste, ushering in a new era for the Minbari people
and the galaxy.
As if to symbolize this great new age, the Minbari would be amongst the first to support
the creation of the Interstellar Alliance which would eventually unite the great races
of the galaxy and serve its citizens faithfully for a million years.
The Templin Institute investigates nations, organizations, and factions from alternate
worlds and realities.
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