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The heart of the Galactic Empire was a single, planet-spanning city. On Trantor, forty billion souls administered the affairs of a quintillion, their world a shell of gleaming metal burrowed miles deep, with no sky to see and no soil to touch. To this center of all things came Gaal Dornick, a young mathematician from the provinces, summoned by the legendary Hari Seldon. But the welcome he received was not what he expected. Seldon, old and frail but with eyes that held the weight of millennia, revealed the true purpose of his work: psychohistory, the mathematics of human behavior, predicted the imminent collapse of the twelve-thousand-year-old Empire. A 30,000-year dark age of barbarism and suffering was poised to descend upon the galaxy.

Brought to trial for treason before the Empire's ruling commission, Seldon did not defend himself but explained his work with chilling certainty. The fall, he stated, was inevitable, a force of historical inertia too great for any man or group to stop. But the ensuing dark age could be shortened. “It is possible,” he told the silent court, “to reduce the duration of anarchy to a single millennium.” His plan was to create two Foundations, scientific refuges at opposite ends of the galaxy, to preserve the sum of human knowledge. They would become the seeds of a Second Galactic Empire, built upon the ashes of the first. The commission, led by the pragmatic Linge Chen, cared little for prophecies of a distant future, but saw a way to remove a political dissident. Seldon and his hundred thousand followers were exiled to the remote, resource-poor planet of Terminus, to work on their great Encyclopedia Galactica.

Fifty years drifted by, and the galaxy frayed at the edges as Seldon had predicted. On Terminus, the Encyclopedists toiled, oblivious to the world outside their archives. But the surrounding star-systems had devolved into squabbling, barbarian kingdoms, and the most powerful of them, Anacreon, now cast a covetous eye on the small world of scientists. The Foundation's leaders, men like Lewis Pirenne, placed their faith in the distant and powerless Emperor. “The Empire can protect its own,” Pirenne insisted, even as an Anacreonian envoy arrived to demand the establishment of a military base. But Salvor Hardin, the first mayor of Terminus, saw the truth: they were alone, an island of nuclear power in an ocean of barbarism.

Hardin understood that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent. He saw that while Anacreon possessed warships, they no longer possessed the science to maintain them. Their knowledge of nuclear power was gone. Playing a delicate game of diplomacy, he visited the other three kingdoms, quietly pointing out that a nuclear-armed Anacreon would mean their own doom. As Anacreon's forces settled onto Terminus, an ultimatum arrived from their three neighbors, and the would-be conquerors were forced into a humiliating withdrawal. On the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, the Time Vault on Terminus opened, and a holographic image of Hari Seldon appeared. The Encyclopedia, he revealed, was a fraud, a convenient fiction to gather them there. Their true purpose was to survive this first of many crises, and they had succeeded.

Decades later, a new crisis loomed. The Foundation's scientific superiority was now draped in the guise of a holy mission, its technology a miracle dispensed by a priesthood loyal to Terminus. This “religion of science” gave them control over the Four Kingdoms, but Anacreon's ambitious regent, Wienis, plotted to seize the Foundation and its power for himself, building a mighty fleet for a holy war. On Terminus, a new political party arose, demanding that Hardin, now old and weary, abandon his policy of appeasement and launch a preemptive war. The Foundation was threatened from without and torn by dissent from within.

Once again, Hardin's solution was not one of force. He allowed Wienis to believe his attack was imminent and his victory assured. But as the king of Anacreon was crowned and the fleet launched its attack, Hardin sprang his trap. At the stroke of midnight, he declared an interdict. Across the entire kingdom of Anacreon, every piece of Foundation technology - every power plant, every ship's engine, every light in every city - went dead. The planet was plunged into darkness and chaos. Aboard the flagship, the head priest, loyal only to the “Galactic Spirit,” cursed the vessel and turned the navy against its blasphemous commanders. The power of the spirit had conquered the power of the sword, and the Foundation's control was absolute.

Another century passed. The Foundation's influence now spread not by priests, but by the ships of independent Traders who pushed the boundaries of known space, their wealth and power growing beyond the control of the central government. The third crisis began quietly, with the disappearance of merchant ships in the territory of the Korellian Republic. Hober Mallow, a Master Trader and an Outlander from Smyrno, was sent by the suspicious government on Terminus to investigate. He found a world armed with nuclear weapons, but their origin was a mystery. Playing the part of a simple merchant obsessed with profit, Mallow offered the despotic Commdor of Korell a trade empire built on gadgets and luxury goods, explicitly excluding the religion his predecessors had always pushed.

Through his shrewd dealings, Mallow discovered the truth. Korell's weapons were supplied by the lingering Galactic Empire, whose provincial governors still held immense power in the galactic core. Visiting one such province, Mallow saw the Empire's weakness firsthand: its technology was colossal and ancient, but its science was stagnant, its machines irreparable. They could build planet-sized engines but could not conceive of the miniature nuclear generators that powered the Foundation's smallest knife. The Empire was a giant, but a dying one.

Returning to Terminus, Mallow used his newfound wealth to build a political power base. He was put on trial by his rivals for abandoning a Foundation priest on Korell, but he turned the tables, exposing the priest as a Korellian secret agent and the trial as a political witch hunt. Swept into the mayorship by popular acclaim, he faced Korell's inevitable declaration of war. His strategy was brutally, elegantly simple: he did nothing. For three years, he imposed a trade embargo. The factories, homes, and lives of Korell, having become dependent on Foundation technology, slowly ground to a halt. A civilization fell, not to the blast of a battleship, but to the quiet failure of a kitchen knife and the cold of an unheated home. The people of Korell revolted, and the Foundation won its third crisis with the power of economics alone, ushering in the era of the Merchant Princes.