First Twenty

Known also as the Creators, this group was a set of twenty rulers who united their forces in a single army called the Alliance to fight a shared foe in a great war. Once the Void Century drew to a close and the Great Kingdom lay defeated, they went on to found the World Government. Every one of their descendants, apart from the Nefertari Family, would later rise as World Nobles, or Celestial Dragons.

Of the twenty original rulers, a single one still lives after eight hundred years: Nerona Imu, who has quietly directed the World Government since its birth as its hidden King of the World. Around eight centuries before the current timeline, twenty royal families drawn from islands all over the world combined their strength against Joy Boy and the Great Kingdom he led.

With the war won, nineteen of the twenty houses resettled in Mary Geoise, the Holy Land. That city sits atop the Red Line, at the midpoint of the Grand Line, a spot often called the world's center. Only the Nefertari family of the Arabasta Kingdom stayed behind in its native land. Around the Empty Throne, each of the nineteen transplanted monarchs placed a weapon, both a promise to protect it and a declaration that the world must never fall under one sole sovereign.

Through the generations, those families folded ever more nations into their compact until it grew into the World Government of the present. As the founders' heirs, the World Nobles hold supreme authority within it, permitted to behave as they wish without penalty and able to call down a Marine Admiral at the slightest sense of threat. Imu, meanwhile, has claimed the Empty Throne and now crushes the very equality his fellow founders once fought to secure.

What sort of people most of these monarchs truly were is still largely a mystery, though fragments remain. King Donquixote is recalled as a savage tyrant who enslaved the Tontatta Tribe, whereas Queen Nefertari D. Lili chose to return home to her homeland instead of settling in Mary Geoise as a World Noble.

Three members have been named: Nerona Imu of the Nerona Family, whose kingdom and heirs remain unknown; Nefertari D. Lili of the Nefertari Family of Arabasta, whose living heir is Nefertari Vivi; and the founder of the Donquixote Family from Dressrosa, whose line includes Donquixote Doflamingo and Donquixote Shivercalero. In the present day Imu stands as the last of the First Twenty, having reached this era by means still unexplained.