Over a thousand years before the events of the Star Wars saga, the Jedi and Sith fought in a war that resulted in the Sith Order’s seeming destruction - only this didn’t happen, according to George Lucas. By the time of the prequel trilogy, the Sith had adopted the Rule of Two, allowing only two Dark Lords to exist at a time, curbing their treacherous nature and allowing them to destroy both the Republic and the Jedi. The war that nearly destroyed the Sith is depicted in both the canon and Legends continuities, but George Lucas claims that neither version happened.
In Legends, the Jedi-Sith War, also known as the New Sith Wars, saw the reformation of the Sith Empire under Darth Ruin (a member of The Lost Twenty), which later evolved into the Brotherhood of Darkness under Lord Kaan. Against Jedi Master Hoth’s Army of Light, the Jedi and Sith viciously clashed for a millennium, with the war ending at the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, a decisive Jedi victory in Star Wars. Canon retains the broad strokes of the Legends version of the conflict, including Darth Bane being the lone Sith survivor and the creator of the Rule of Two.
In a 2019 interview with George Lucas, however, the Star Wars creator reveals that he doesn’t agree with canon or Legends. To Lucas, the Sith destroyed themselves without a war with the Jedi. On this, Lucas remarked,
“Everybody said, 'Oh, well, there was a war between the Jedi and the Sith.' Well, that never happened. That’s just made up by fans or somebody. What really happened is, the Sith ruled the universe for a while, 2,000 years ago. Each Sith has an apprentice, but the problem was, each Sith Lord got to be powerful. And the Sith Lords would try to kill each other because they all wanted to be the most powerful. So in the end they killed each other off, and there wasn’t anything left.”
For better or worse, this is not the first time that George Lucas has contradicted the continuity of his creation. Lucas advised writers to resurrect Palpatine in the Legends-era comic Dark Empire and approved of various stories in which Luke and Mara Jade were a married couple, only to state that he doesn’t believe either concept exists in his Star Wars timeline. In both continuities, Lucas allowed the Mandalorian culture to sprout from the fan-favorite bounty hunters Boba Fett and Jango Fett, only to declare them Mandalorian pretenders (which was partially undone in canon’s The Mandalorian). 2008’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars created a plethora of continuity snarls with the Legends universe, in large part due to Lucas’ story ideas.
While the Star Wars franchise wouldn’t exist without George Lucas, he, unfortunately, tends to disregard continuity. Regardless of Lucas’ statements, the Star Wars canon and Legends timelines both feature the Jedi-Sith War. Both continuities, however, honor Lucas’ statement that the Sith were ultimately more responsible for their downfall than the Jedi.
In both continuities, the Sith Order’s penchant for in-fighting weakened and divided their ranks, making them far easier for the Jedi to defeat. Moreover, the Legends version of the war has the Brotherhood of Darkness nearly eradicate itself with a dark side-fueled superweapon that went awry. In both cases, the Sith Order’s defeat led their only surviving Dark Lord to rebuild the Sith using the Rule of Two as its bedrock, transforming them into the Sith Order seen in George Lucas’ Star Wars films.
