This article contains heavy spoilers for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and light spoilers for Star Wars: Rebels.
Bare with me as I try to condense a few thousand years of lore into a digestable serving. If you’re at all curious about things I may have crossed over (Like the Mandalorian Jedi Tarre Vizsla) I strongly recommend you dig in on the EU.
Let me rip the band-aid off real quick. Boba Fett & Jango Fett are not Mandalorians. Jango is just some dude who bought/stole a set of Mandalorian armor to use for bounty hunting because it is beyond top of the line. Are you confused yet? It’s cool, I got you.
I mean, really, who are the Mandalorians? The short answer I could tell you is “Space Spartans,” but it’s actually a little more tragic than that. You see, going all the way back to when the ancient Sith and Jedi were tearing up the galaxy during the “Hundred Year Darkness,” there was a third party standing on the side lines. You guessed it.
A colossal ancient empire of warriors. War is their religion. It is there way of life. Failure is a sin and conquest is the closest you can get to God. So, they look at these battling Space Wizards and say: “1: Back the fuck up! 2: We’re taking your shit.” Wearing armor forged from their holy metal, Beskar, and designing weapons specifically to counter Force powers, the Empire of Mandalore joined the war.
By this point the early days of the Republic were coming together, and the Jedi took it as their duty to protect this fledgling group of planets, just trying to live in peace.
Over the millennia Mandalore would seed much of it’s territory to the Republic, but still maintain their sense of honor and dignity. In time, the culture started to shift. Following their defeat at the hands of the Jedi, Mandalore was left a scorched husk. It’s citizens forced to live in climate controlled domes. This lead the Mandalorian people to question some of their more war focused traditions. It’s an understandable thought after being smacked down so hard your planet is practically uninhabitable.
The choice was made to move toward a culture of Pacifism. Of course not everyone agreed, and when a pacifist Duchess was elected, those who refused to follow were exiled to Mandalore’s moon Concordia. For a time there was peace, but a terrorist group was born among the exiles. And when the Clone Wars began, Pre Vizsla, leader or the terroristic “Deathwatch”, and descendant of an ancient Madalorian hero, took the opportunity, afforded by Mandalore’s neutrality in the conflict, to reclaim the planet, and return the people to their proud warrior ways. The rub though, is that by returning to the ancient ways, Pre Vizsla left himself open to challenge, and the recently returned Maul (No longer a Darth) was able to defeat him in singles combat and take the throne.
With Maul in charge, the Republic could no longer sit idle, and began to lay siege to Mandalore in the last days of the Clone Wars. We all know how the war ended. Order 66. And just like that, the clone troopers, sent to liberate the planet, became the occupying stormtroopers of the Empire.
The last time we saw Mandalore was in Star Wars: Rebels, where the people finally rose up and began a rebellion against the Empire, but that story was never followed up on. So, where we find our hero and the other Mandalorians in the first episode of the new series, is the closest answer we have to how the revolution turned out. A once mighty Warrior Empire, brought low and forced to live as refugees in the outer rim of the galaxy.