Gallifreyan history

Gallifrey, the home planet of the Time Lords, had a long and storied history. The Time Lord civilisation lasted billions of years, existing in the distant past at the dawn of time (PROSE: The Crystal Bucephalus) so that by the 20th century there was no sign of any civilisation on Gallifrey. (PROSE: Goth Opera)


 * Due to the use of time travel by the Time Lords and the lack of outside points of reference, some historical events can be hard to date accurately, if at all.

Pre-Time Lords
The Daleks tried to travel back to prehistoric Gallifrey to prevent the Time Lords evolving. Before the Time Lords a lizard-like creature inhabited the planet which later went extinct. (PROSE: Engines of War)

Time of Empires
The Dark Time, also known as the Old Times or the Age of the Pythias, preceded the unrelated Dark Times of the universe itself. (COMIC: Agent Provocateur) This first era, the Time of Empires preceded the Time of Chaos. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) The history of this period was recorded by Rassilon in the Black Scrolls of Rassilon, which became forbidden by the time of the Doctor. (TV: The Five Doctors)

The Gallifreyans were an ancient species, one of the first humanoid species to evolve. (PROSE: Lucifer Rising, TV: The Beast Below) A Time Lord emissary reminded the Fourth Doctor that Gallifrey had perfected the transmat beam when the universe was less than half its "present" size. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks)

Gallifreyans were known as the Shadow People during this era, caught between the warm darkness of magic and the cold light of science. Magic dominated Gallifreyan culture for a long time. (PROSE: So Vile a Sin) During the Fledgling Empires' war against the Racnoss, the Empress of the Racnoss claimed that Gallifrey "murdered" the Racnoss. (TV: The Runaway Bride) The Gallifreyans fought against the Old Ones. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)

The Gallifreyans' early empire was huge. They had colonies across their galaxy. Slave trading, protested by some, was common. Gallifrey was ruled by the Pythia, a line of female seers who divined the future and ruled Gallifrey. They also perpetuated mysticism on Gallifrey, and were against the use of reason. After the Intuitive Revelation, telepathy was used rather than speech and few individuals kept their own personality or secrets. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) Many Gallifreyans worshipped the Menti Celesti. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) Gallifreyan religious classes, including priests, monks and wardens of the church, had a high place in Gallifreyan society until after the rise of the Time Lords. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)

Early research into time travel was performed. The first time machine, the Time Scaphe, was powered psychically rather than technologically. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) The Archons claimed that the Time Lords didn't discover time travel for themselves, but developed it after they declared war on the Archons and stole their technology. (PROSE: The Nameless City)

The Time of Chaos
The power of the Pythia declined in the Time of Chaos. The Neo-Technologists, led by Rassilon, rose to power. The last Pythia lost her power of prediction, cursed Gallifrey with sterility and killed herself. Surviving members of the Pythian order fled to Karn, where they became the Sisterhood. After the collapse of the Pythia, war and chaos threatened the empire. An ice age began and Gallifrey's colonies demanded their freedom. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible)

Out of the Time of Chaos, a living metal, validium, came in to use by the Time Lords. A piece of validium left Gallifrey and came to Earth. (TV: Silver Nemesis)

The early days of the Time Lords
The Time Lords had two main founders, namely the technological polymath Rassilon (TV: The Deadly Assassin) and the stellar engineer Omega. (TV: The Three Doctors) They lived at the same time. (COMIC: Star Death, TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) The Time Lords had four other founders, namely the Other, Apeiron, Pandak, and possibly Eutenoyar. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors, PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)

The Age of Rassilon
Rassilon instituted changes to deal with the problems of the Empire. He ordered the creation of genetic looms to permit the Gallifreyan race to reproduce. The Great Houses were formed to stabilise society. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible)

The Time Lords, before any race, began their research into black holes. (TV: The Satan Pit) One of Rassilon's early attempts to create a black hole accidentally punched a hole into the Yssgaroth's universe. The Yssgaroth escaped and caused mass destruction. The Time Lords, led by Kopyion Liall a Mahajetsu, tried to stop them, leading to the thousand year Eternal War. They eventually pushed the Yssgaroth back into their own universe. Kopyion Liall a Mahajetsu guarded the final opening. (PROSE: The Pit)

Omega used two stellar manipulators, the "hands" of Omega, to detonate a star (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) known as Qqaba, to create a black hole from which the Time Lords drew the power for time travel. Omega was himself cast through the black hole into an anti-matter universe and was presumed dead. (TV: The Three Doctors, COMIC: Star Death, AUDIO: Omega) Rassilon eventually retrieved the Eye of Harmony and stored it in a vault beneath the Time Lord capitol as a source of power. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)



While the Time Lords were still influencing other worlds, they tried doing business with the Hoothi. They caused a war on one of the worlds with which Gallifrey was negotiating, and later attacked Gallifrey itself using a Time Lord ambassador as a host. The Time Lords struck back with a counterattack and put the Hoothi worlds in a time loop. The Hoothi were forced to leave the galaxy. (PROSE: Love and War, AUDIO: Love and War)

The Game of Rassilon was a blood sport played in the Death Zone on Gallifrey using the Time Scoop. The Time Scoop relocated beings from all of time and space (with the exception of the Daleks and Cybermen, considered too dangerous to try to contain) and placed them in the Death Zone to fight each other to the death. (TV: The Five Doctors)

After the damage that had been done by the Time Lords to other species using time travel, the Non-interference policy was instituted. (TV: Underworld, PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)

The Matrix was set up during the reign of Rassilon. Following damage to the Time Vortex, a robotic construction, Dawn 726-Alpha Continua, was set up to repair the damage. (COMIC: Dawn of Time!)

Rassilon's rule saw the war with the Great Vampires (TV: State of Decay) and the end of the games in the Death Zone. (TV: The Five Doctors) During the Millennium War 150 million years BC, Rassilon defied the non-interference policy and led the Time Lords against the Mad Mind of Bophemeral. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)

One legend said that despite Rassilon's great achievements, the Time Lords rebelled against him and imprisoned him in the Dark Tower in the Death Zone. (TV: The Five Doctors)

Later history
Millennia of isolation induced a complacency among the Time Lords. Their technology and power stagnated, even as other races became more powerful and dangerous. (TV: The Deadly Assassin)
 * The specific order of the following events is unknown.


 * The High Council dissolved the monasteries and churches of Gallifrey. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)
 * Mawdryn and a group of scientists tried to steal the secrets of Regeneration from Gallifrey, stealing a metamorphic symbiosis regenerator, but they were unsuccessful and they became stuck in a cycle of never-ending mutated regeneration. (TV: Mawdryn Undead)
 * The Doctor attempted to ban the Miniscope as a cruel practice. The Time Lords set aside their non-interference policy to have the Miniscopes recalled. (TV: Carnival of Monsters)
 * The Time Lords developed a chemical that could turn vertebrate blood into acid, but the Doctor successfully campaigned for it to be banned. (PROSE: The Age of Ambition)
 * The Time Lords tried to prevent human researches centred on the USS Eldridge, which was tearing a hole in space. Though they succeeded, the ship was believed to be lost. (AUDIO: The Macros, GAME: Shadows of the Vashta Nerada)

The Doctor's era
During the lifetime of the Doctor, several crises occurred which brought to light the vulnerabilities of the once-omnipotent Time Lords. Testimony at the Second Doctor's malfeasance tribunal revealed many marauding races had emerged in the universe after the Time Lords adopted their isolationist policies. (TV: The War Games)

When the Doctor was very young, Ulysses was told by Larna, a Time Lady from the future, that the fate of Gallifrey was mixed with that of the Doctor and that the Doctor would have a part to play in its downfall. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

The Time Lords were easily rendered helpless when Omega began to drain energy from Gallifrey, and were only saved by the intervention of the Second and Third Doctor. (TV: The Three Doctors)

The ease with which was able to alter records in the Archives and manipulate the Matrix was due largely to the fact that the technology behind the Matrix's APC Net had been surpassed on other worlds. On those worlds the technology would, according to the Doctor, be considered "prehistoric junk".

The Time Lords faced "the most dangerous crisis in their long history" when the Master arranged the President's assassination as part of a plan to take control of the Eye of Harmony. The Eye was thought mythical, but in reality it resided underneath the Panopticon and continued to power all of Gallifrey's technology. The Fourth Doctor saved Gallifrey and left. (TV: The Deadly Assassin)

The Doctor's departure left Gallifrey in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Due to a legal technicality exploited by the Doctor, he was now technically President, the only other candidate, Goth, having been killed. For a time, Gallifrey seemed to have no President. The Doctor eventually returned to claim the title as part of a plot to defeat a Vardan invasion. This invasion was a front, however, for a Sontaran invasion of Gallifrey. Although defeated, these invasions exposed weaknesses in Gallifrey's defences. (TV: The Invasion of Time)

Later, the High Council decided to physically move Earth in order to preserve secrets stolen from the Matrix. (TV: The Mysterious Planet)

These revelations caused a revolution on Gallifrey. (TV: The Ultimate Foe)

War with the Enemy

 * See also The War.

In a now defunct future, the Time Lords went to war with a foe known only as the Enemy. The war was temporal in nature and cracks appeared throughout the Web of Time. They ran backwards through time, affecting the past. (PROSE: Alien Bodies) The war with the Enemy raged for an undefinable time, but eventually temporal events reached a critical level. The Eighth Doctor attacked openly, destroying Gallifrey, and averting the war ever happening. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)


 * At some point after this, Gallifrey was restored. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles, The Tomorrow Windows)



Gallifrey falls no more
During the Last Great Time War, Rassilon was resurrected by the Time Lords. (PROSE: Engines of War)

After more then 400 years of war the Time Lords grew mad, and sought to end time itself to free themselves from physical bodies.

To avert their destruction, the Time Lords sent a four-beat signal into the Master's mind and then sent a White-Point Star diamond to 2009 Earth. With the drumming as a signal and the diamond as a connection,, who had survived the war, broke the Time lock at the end of the war and pulled a group of Time Lords through to Earth, and also pulled Gallifrey through. However, Gallifrey was returned to the last day of the Time War inside the Time lock when the Tenth Doctor destroyed the White-Point Star within the Nuclear Bolt that was generating the signal. (TV: The End of Time)

During the Eleventh Doctor's timestream, he and all of his prior incarnations (as well as his successor incarnation, unbeknownst to him) came together to freeze Gallifrey and the surviving Time Lords in time; and transferred Gallifrey to a pocket universe where it was safe from the Daleks, who destroyed themselves. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) Due to the memory of these events being wiped from every incarnation before the Eleventh Doctor, the Ninth Doctor believed himself responsible for the destruction of both the Time Lords and Gallifrey. (TV: The End of the World, Dalek)

The Time Lords began reaching out through a Crack sending the message "Doctor who?" on the planet Trenzalore in order that the Eleventh Doctor might speak his true name and return them to the universe. Rather than restart the Time War, the Doctor refused for hundreds of years. The Time Lords did save the dying Doctor's life by granting him the a new cycle of regenerations, allowing him to regenerate into the Twelfth Doctor before closing the crack and sealing themselves away in the pocket universe, possibly forever (TV: The Time of the Doctor).

After the end
New Alexandria, the planet on which the Crystal Bucephalus was located, was implied to be the ruined remains of Gallifrey. (PROSE: The Crystal Bucephalus)

Apparently 60 billion years after 2367 AD, at the end of the universe, Gallifrey had been destroyed and Winkle's Wonderland had been relocated there. The Divergence made an attempt to break free at the end. (AUDIO: Zagreus)