Editorial note: this is not one of Lucasfilm's nine official publishing eras. It is a subdivision this site uses because the Bane reset is the hinge the whole saga turns on and the official chart has nowhere to put it.
Every villain in the films is downstream of a decision made by one man in 1,000 BBY. The Sith of the Old Republic lost because they were an empire: visible, plural, and constantly murdering each other for rank. Darth Bane's answer was to stop being an empire. Two Sith at a time — one to hold power, one to want it — and no third to dilute the line or start a civil war. From that point the Sith stop appearing in galactic history at all, which is precisely the design.
The reset
In the Legends account, the New Sith Wars end at Ruusan when Lord Kaan detonates a thought bomb that annihilates his own Brotherhood of Darkness along with much of the Jedi Army of Light. Bane, who engineered the situation, walks away and takes a girl called Rain as his apprentice, renaming her Darth Zannah. The Republic, meanwhile, enacts the Ruusan Reformations under Chancellor Tarsus Valorum: the standing army is disbanded, the Senate is restructured, and the calendar itself is reset from the battle. Which is why so many things in this franchise are dated from a point exactly one thousand years before The Phantom Menace.
What is canon here and what is not
Be precise about this, because it trips people up. The Rule of Two itself is canon. Darth Bane is canon — he appears as a vision on the Sith world Moraband in The Clone Wars season six episode “Sacrifice” (2014), voiced by Mark Hamill. Current continuity states that the Sith destroyed themselves a thousand years before the films and that the survivors went into hiding under a two-at-a-time rule.
Everything else is Legends. Drew Karpyshyn's Bane trilogy — Path of Destruction (2006), Rule of Two (2007), Dynasty of Evil (2009) — is the definitive telling and is not in current canon. Nor is James Luceno's Darth Plagueis (2012), which traces the line down to Palpatine. The Plagueis story survives in canon only as the anecdote Palpatine tells at the opera in Revenge of the Sith, which names no dates and confirms nothing.
The long silence
The nine centuries between Bane and Naboo are the emptiest stretch of published Star Wars, and deliberately so — the Sith spend them doing nothing anyone can observe. Note that The High Republic sits entirely inside this era: the golden age happening on the surface and the hidden succession happening underneath are the same four hundred years, told by different books that never meet. Reading them side by side is the closest thing this franchise has to dramatic irony at scale.
The last decades of the silence are the busiest, because they are the ones the prequel films made worth writing about. Claudia Gray’s Master & Apprentice (40 BBY) and the Scholastic Jedi Apprentice line (from 44 BBY) both sit inside this era by the dates, even though every reader thinks of them as prequel books. That is the cost of an era boundary drawn at The Phantom Menace rather than at a change of subject.
The silence breaks in 32 BBY, when a Zabrak with a double-bladed lightsaber kills a Jedi Master on Naboo and the Council has to say out loud that the Sith are back. That is where Fall of the Jedi begins.
