Turian Hierarchy

The Turian Hierarchy was the government of the turians, a militaristic and disciplined people native to the planet Palaven and the third race to gain a seat on the Citadel Council. The turians earned that seat through their service during the Krogan Rebellions, after which they filled the galactic peacekeeping role left vacant by the subdued krogan and contributed the single largest portion of the Citadel Fleet. Respected for a public service ethic so strong that it was the turians who first proposed the creation of C-Sec, the Hierarchy was nonetheless sometimes regarded as rigid or imperialist, and it carried lingering animosity with the Systems Alliance following the First Contact War.

A meritocratic government#

The Turian Hierarchy was a hierarchical meritocracy whose potential for misuse was tempered by the civic duty and personal responsibility instilled in turians from childhood. It recognized twenty-seven tiers of citizenship, beginning with civilians and children, with formal citizenship conferred only after boot camp; client races earned citizenship after completing their service. Higher-ranked citizens were expected to lead and protect their subordinates while lower ranks obeyed and supported their superiors. At the summit stood the Primarchs, each ruling a colonization cluster and voting on matters of national importance while otherwise trusting subordinates to perform their duties. Promotion and occasional demotion were based on the assessment of one's superiors and peers, and the stigma of demotion fell on those who had promoted a turian prematurely rather than on the individual, curbing overreach. Turians enjoyed broad personal freedoms so long as they completed their duties and did not prevent others from completing theirs.

History and the Unification War#

Turian civilization spanned fifteen thousand years, and the race was known even to the ancient Protheans. As the asari were forming the Council with the salarians, the turians were embroiled in the Unification War, a civil conflict among distant colonies that had drifted from the Hierarchy and grown isolated and xenophobic. The Hierarchy maintained strict neutrality until only a handful of factions remained, then intervened to compel the exhausted chieftains to renew their allegiance. The war left a lasting mark: turians thereafter wore the facial markings of their home colonies, and the term "barefaced," for one without such markings, came to mean someone untrustworthy.

The Krogan Rebellions#

During the Krogan Rebellions the Council made first contact with the turians and enlisted their war machine against the krogan threat. The initial turian offensive routed many krogan warbands but provoked a devastating counterattack; the krogan rendered three turian worlds uninhabitable with asteroid strikes, and the bloodiest battle in turian history was fought at Digeris. Rather than retreat, the turians resolved to crush the krogan utterly, ultimately deploying the salarian-developed genophage to remove the krogan numerical advantage. By around 800 CE most krogan resistance was subdued, and by 900 CE the turians were granted full Council membership in recognition of their service, taking up the peacekeeping role the krogan had once filled.

Society and culture#

Turian society was highly regimented and built around a strong sense of public service; it was rare to find a turian who placed personal needs ahead of the group. Every citizen from age fifteen to thirty served the state in some capacity, from soldier to administrator to sanitation worker. The military was the center of turian life and functioned as an all-encompassing public works organization, with the same institution serving as military and civilian police, fire brigade, and corps of engineers. Turians prized personal accountability above all, considering it their worst sin to lie about their own actions, and they generally practiced meritocracy over nepotism. Their religion held that groups and places possessed transcendent "spirits" that could inspire the living, and they enjoyed broad freedom of belief. To compensate for a cultural disinterest in commerce, the Hierarchy accepted the mercantile volus as a client race, offering protection in exchange for fiscal expertise.

The military#

The turian military was defined less by exceptional equipment than by formidable discipline: officers were career veterans, enlisted soldiers stayed calm under fire, and turian units did not break, falling back in order and setting ambushes even when their line collapsed. Command was decentralized, allowing individual squads to call for artillery and air support, and the turians practiced combined arms with infantry, armor, and gunships. Each legion maintained a full-time staff of historians, and a destroyed legion was reconstituted rather than replaced. The turians recruited auxiliaries from absorbed minor races such as the volus, granting them citizenship after service, and they suppressed citizen militias through grim execution squads known as hastatim paired with "safe camps" that incentivized surrender. The turian navy was divided into at least thirty-two fleets and, under the Treaty of Farixen, was allotted more dreadnoughts than any other race, possessing thirty-nine by 2185; it served as the primary military arm of the Council and the largest contributor to the Citadel Fleet.

First contact with humanity#

In 2157 a turian force, enforcing the long-standing Council ban on activating uncharted mass relays, opened fire on human explorers who were unaware of the law. The conflict escalated rapidly into what humanity called the First Contact War and the turians called the Relay 314 Incident. A turian fleet broke through the outnumbered Alliance lines and besieged the colony of Shanxi, which surrendered and was occupied, but one month later the Alliance's Second Fleet caught the occupiers by surprise and drove them off. Before a protracted war could develop, the Citadel Council intervened, revealed the galactic community to humanity, and ordered the turians to pay heavy reparations as the instigators. Mistrust lingered for years, though it slowly began to heal, exemplified by the two species jointly building the Normandy SR-1.

The Reaper War#

During the Reaper invasion of 2186, the turian colony of Taetrus was among the first worlds attacked after the fall of Khar'shan and Earth, and the Hierarchy's two attempts to liberate it failed. The Reapers then poured into the Trebia system and assaulted Palaven and its moon Menae, where much of the turian fleet remained operable and a heavily armed citizenry supported the troops; nonetheless turian casualties mounted rapidly. Relief came from an unlikely ally when the krogan, their genophage cured, joined the war: while the Reaper fleet was distracted, krogan reinforcements landed on Palaven and helped smuggle warp bombs and fission weapons aboard Reaper ships, retaking large swathes of territory in a victory that boosted galactic morale. Recognizing the hopelessness of holding Palaven, Primarch Adrien Victus eventually withdrew the surviving turian warships from the Trebia system to join the Allied assault on Earth, where turian forces fought in both the space and ground battles while Commander Shepard reached the Citadel to trigger the Crucible.