Who ordered the creation of the Primaris Space Marines?

[Montuhotep]

This is where my Lore-Fu is weak.

 

Primaris Marines - was the driving force behind them the Emperor or Guilliman? They are a product of Cawl's meddling right enough, but who ordered the inception of the project?

 

Because big E was somewhat forthright about Primarchs who over-stepped their boundaries without explicit permission, even when said Primarch was convinced he was right to do so.

[Karhedron]

It was Guilliman who ordered their creation. However "The Great Work" shows that the Emperor set up Cawl with the knowledge and resources he would need for the project, presumably as a contingency. This pretty much guarantees the Emperor approved of the project, even if Guilliman didn't know it at the time.

[redmapa]

Guilliman tasked Cawl with the project but even before that the Emperor had tasked his scientists with a similar project and even before the Scouring the Emperor had already created a new branch of marines that had their own geneseed lineage and better equipped than the legions of old, the Grey Knights were kind of like a proof of concept to the idea that the Astartes framework could be improved on in the future.

[lansalt]

Don't forget that the Emperor gave Corax the data about the Astartes project so he could repenish his legion with better and faster to make marines that were almost proto-primaris: the Raptors. Without the Alpha legion sabotage those could have been the new generation.

IIRC is implied in the end of "Sons of the Selenar" that the surviving data ended being part of the Primaris Project.

[Sword Brother Adelard]

It's also worth noting that even after the delivery of the first batches, Guilliman did not fully trust the Primaris Marines at first.

 

In The Avenging Son he places firstborn officers in charge of the new Primaris units, because, despite his ordering them, he doesn't fully trust Cawl, and they were Cawl's creations.

 

I think as The Dawn of Fire series progresses we may see more of this, leading to the position we are at in the Plague Wars books where crossing the Rubicon is becoming almost mainstream.

[Orange Knight]

I want to add that it's really worth investing in novels like "The Great Work" by Guy Haley.

 

It answers so many questions and gives a lot of insight into how things came to be. Simply a fantastic book, and that isn't even mentioning some of the lore implications and set ups it laid out for future events.

 

Guilliman doesn't fully trust Cawl (this comes to light in the Dark Imperium Trilogy) and that has a lot to do with his initial distrust of his works at the start. As for whether Cawl is a heretic, a genius or something more than human, I really don't want to spoil things here.