Saudir III al-Harkonnen: the Harkonnen usurper of the Golden Lion Throne

Duke Saudir Harkonnen was a member of a junior branch of House Harkonnen who served as Duke of Eluzai until 388 AG, when he usurped the Golden Lion Throne and ruled as Emperor of the Known Universe under the regnal name Saudir III al-Harkonnen. His reign lasted barely a year, from 388 to 389 AG, yet it left two durable marks on imperial history: the designation of Salusa Secundus as a prison planet, and the recall of the exiled main branch of House Harkonnen to the Imperium. It ended in one of the most savage palace revolts ever recorded, when the Sardaukar turned on the usurper, butchered him together with nearly all of his family, and restored the blind ex-emperor Wallach I to the throne.

The dukes of Eluzai#

Saudir Harkonnen was born into the one branch of House Harkonnen that had come through the Battle of Corrin with its honor intact. While the main line of the house was disgraced by its conduct in that battle and driven into exile in 88 BG, Ivan Harkonnen had made a heroic stand at Corrin, and in reward his son Nikolai was created the first Duke of Eluzai in 82 BG by the first Corrino emperor, Sheuset I. Saudir was a descendant of Nikolai and inherited the duchy in his turn, holding it until the year he reached for the throne itself.

The dukes of Eluzai carried an old and useful pretension. House Harkonnen claimed common origin with the imperial House Corrino, asserting descent from Count Palaigo Corrino, the grandfather of the first Corrino emperor Sheuset I Costin I. The claim was never proven, but for a duke who intended to seat himself on the Golden Lion Throne, even an unproven kinship with the ruling dynasty had its value.

The usurpation of 388#

The Imperium that Saudir seized was already in disorder. The emperor Wallach I, who had reigned from 362 to 369, had been deposed and blinded, and from 369 the empire was governed not by a crowned Corrino but by a regent, Henli I al-Qair. The regency was then shaken by open war. From 385 to 388 several noble houses banded together as the Lishash Confederation, objecting to the supremacy of imperial rule and to a proposed redistribution of shares in CHOAM that would have raised the emperor's votes on the CHOAM board from 20 percent to 21 percent, a change in which the Lishashi saw a creeping monopoly. Al-Qair put the rebellion down with ruthless assaults on the Confederation's worlds, and the fighting ended in 388 with the Imperium victorious but strained.

In that year Saudir Harkonnen struck. He overthrew the regent, proclaimed himself Emperor of the Known Universe, and took the regnal name Saudir III, placing himself third in the line of emperors called Saudir after Saudir I the Great and Saudir II Negara II. To mark the change of dynasty he founded the House of Rautha as the new Imperial House, displacing the Corrino line that had held the throne since the Battle of Corrin.

The prison decree of Salusa Secundus#

The most lasting act of Saudir's reign grew directly out of the war he had exploited. The rebellion of the Lishash Confederation had left the Imperium holding great numbers of prisoners of war whom al-Qair had spared, and the new emperor needed somewhere to put them. In 388 AG Saudir designated Salusa Secundus as a prison planet and consigned the captives there.

The decree outlived him and grew into something he never intended. After his death, the restored Wallach I decided in 390 to use the penal colony as an experimental laboratory. Knowing the prisoners could not survive the depredations of the planet's native tribes unaided, Wallach provided them with training and weapons, and from that experiment the harsh world began its long evolution into the proving ground associated with the Imperium's fiercest soldiery. The prison planet itself, however, was Saudir's creation.

The return of the exiled Harkonnens#

Saudir's other act of consequence as emperor concerned his own extended family. The main branch of House Harkonnen had lived in exile since the Battle of Corrin in 88 BG, nearly five centuries of banishment from the affairs of the Imperium. Saudir permitted the exiles to return. The head of the house, Yevgeny Harkonnen, was granted a small estate on the planet Powys, a modest holding, but a foothold inside the Imperium from which the long restoration of the Harkonnen name could begin.

The revolt of the Sardaukar#

In 389 AG the Sardaukar rose against the usurper in a palace revolt of exceptional cruelty. Saudir was overthrown and murdered, and the soldiers then butchered his family. Three of his children were battered against the walls of his own bedroom, his widow was raped and then strangled, and even his pet birds were killed. Of the whole household, only one son, Saudir II Harkonnen, escaped the slaughter.

Their vengeance complete, the Sardaukar went to the prison cell of the blind ex-emperor Wallach I and brought him out. On New Year's Day, 390, they restored him to the throne he had lost more than two decades before, and the brief first reign of the House of Rautha was over.

The Rautha inheritance#

The house Saudir founded did not die with him. His surviving son inherited the Duchy of Eluzai and, in time, his father's ambition. In 445 AG Saudir II Harkonnen organized a revolt of the provincial Sardaukar, defeated the forces loyal to Emperor Sheuset II Costin II in a brief battle, and took the throne as Emperor Saudir IV of the House of Rautha, the Imperial House his father had established. He ruled for six years until his death in 451 from an infected monkey bite. He never married, and with him the Duchy of Eluzai became extinct and the line of the Eluzai usurpers ended. The two Rautha emperors, father and son, remained in imperial memory as a matched pair: Harkonnen dukes who twice seized the Golden Lion Throne, and twice failed to keep it.