The Rule of Two was an essay pertaining to an eponymous doctrine authored by the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Bane some time after the Seventh Battle of Ruusan. It became the cornerstone of Bane's reformed Sith Order and was passed down from master to apprentice in the Sith Archives. It was eventually included in Darth Sidious's Book of Sith sometime after the end of the Clone Wars.
In 1000 BBY, the Brotherhood of Darkness, a Sith organization founded and led by Lord Skere Kaan, was defeated by the Jedi Order during the Seventh Battle of Ruusan. Darth Bane, the last surviving Dark Lord, decided to restructure the Sith into a new order, in which the practices of the Brotherhood were replaced with his own system, the Rule of Two. To assert his views, Bane wrote The Rule of Two, a source book detailing his eponymous Sith philosophy.
That document was conserved in the hidden Sith Archives and was passed down from master to apprentice for centuries. In the last decades of the Galactic Republic, it fell into the hands of Darth Sidious, the Sith alter ego of the politician Palpatine. After the start of the Clone Wars in 22 BBY, The Rule of Two was handed to the Count Dooku, a fallen Jedi Master who had become Sidious' apprentice under the name of Darth Tyranus. He shared this text with the Kiffar Jedi Knight Quinlan Vos in an attempt to lure and corrupt him. Vos left many annotations in the margins.
Following the end of the Clone Wars in 19 BBY, Darth Sidious compiled various seminal Sith texts into his Book of Sith, and he included Bane's text amongst its sections. It should be noted that Sidious also scrawled notes of his own across the pages.
Darth Bane, the author of The Rule of Two
- Power of the Sith
- The Mistakes of Ruusan
- The Title of Darth
- Striking from the Shadows
- Selecting an Apprentice
- The Revenge of the Sith
- Personal Combat
- Lightsaber Construction
- Sith Lightsaber Variants
- Lightsaber Combat
- Using the Saberstaff
- Sith Armor
- Dark Side Combat
- Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side