The Chronicles of Foundation is a history of the first five reigns, by the Fifth Emperor’s court historian, Sorthos. His main interest is in painting the first three emperors as extremely wise and good rulers; he’s trying to imitate the same terse style as Arvad and the Second Emperor (and, by the people he quotes, something like it has become the standard court style for writing in his period), and he largely agrees with A Grand Reckoning and My Reign as to the events; he isn’t putting explicit expected value estimates on them the way My Reign is, but he’s at least including statistics, ideally to make the Emperors look good.
After writing My Reign, the Second Emperor did extensive research into life-extension, he did not, however, get the chance to use them before being dying “in a spell-research accident.” Assassins were, of course, suspected, though not by agents of the Third Emperor, who largely kept his predecessor’s policies and advisors. Throughout the book, Sorthos traces the careers of a number of the Third Emperor’s ministers; the most common fate for them is death, mostly at the hands of religious fanatics or unknown assassins, but one does die to a bridge breaking under him. All, of course, are honest, loyal and incorruptible, until their tragic deaths.
The Third Emperor reigned for 70 (some sources say 90) years, which were of peaceful, successful expansion. Famines went down, roads were built, and the Imperial City, Jacona collected a university and dozens of specialist craft guilds. Spells were developed to make land scarred by the Cataclysm habitable, permanent Gate-networks were expanded, and his reign is remembered as a golden age.
Unlike the Fourth Emperor’s. The Fourth Emperor was worried that the line of Good Emperors would break, and (says Sorthos) caused the catastrophe he sought to avert; his writings survive, in the same dry cost/benefit analysis style as the Second’s, and he thought that the risk of someone failing to select a good successor who could select a good successor were just too high to continue risking.
So he decided to have all the people of Jacona elect an Emperor to rule them. The politicking around it was horrible, the leading candidates died in implausible accidents, and the fourth-runner ruled as an utterly incompetent ‘People’s Emperor’ for four years of bad decisions before civil war broke out, Jacona was in flames, and the Gate-network was destroyed.
The Fifth Emperor was the one who sorted the mess out, ruled for a hundred and twenty years, established schools in every town in the empire, and conquered a few small, badly-run kingdoms that were significant enough to be more than bandit tribes; Sorthos admits that starting wars is theoretically bad, explains why it was the right thing to do (the kingdoms were really very badly-run; he has Second-Emperor style statistics), and then explains how they developed into excellent provinces of the Empire that are happy and never have any rebellions.
The Fifth Emperor also commissioned this history of the foundation; now that all the crises are over, unwise experiments are concluded, and the Empire is set on a path of science, industry, and expansion, we know exactly what we should be doing and can continue doing it for the rest of history. Hurrah for the Empire!