When you deal with the fantasy genre, timelines tend to get stretched out. Think about how much happened during the 20th century - Empires fell, the world was rocked by two World Wars and a forty-year stand-off that looked like it could bring us to a third (which could have ended the world as we knew it.) We went from cobbling together a contraption that could take us flying over a few sand dunes to walking on the moon. Tons of things happened.
In fantasy, no author (no, not even JRR Tolkien or George RR Martin) can match actual history for the sheer density of historical events. Yet we often deal with far greater stretches of time.
Warcraft is one of the most detailed game-worlds out there, but there are huge gaps. We know that the Night Elves fought in the War of the Ancients ten thousand years ago. At some point in there they fought the War of the Shifting Sands... and at some point Orcs and Humans started stumbling into their lands during the Third War.
That means that in the last ten thousand years between the War of the Ancients and the Third War, essentially one really notable event happened for them - even though many of the Night Elves could easily fill us in on the details, given that most of them were already around during the War of the Ancients.
And the Night Elves aren't even the oldest race in the game. The Draenei seem to be functionally ageless - they aren't exactly immortal, as they can be killed violently (and boy do they ever get killed violently) but they seem to hit maturity and then just keep living. It's possible that they just have an incredibly long lifespan - which might explain why Velen actually looks old compared to other Draenei - but either way, many of the Draenei remember Argus, which they left twenty-five thousand years ago - two and a half times longer than it has been since the War of the Ancients.
Of course, there are some races who aren't individually long-lived, but have been around for a seriously long time. As far as we can tell, the Trolls are the oldest humanoid civilization on Azeroth. Troll history suggests that there were Trolls who witnessed the coming of the Titans - though given that the Titans came to Azeroth at least twice - once to establish the planet and once to discover and fight the Old Gods - it's somewhat ambiguous how long ago, exactly, that was (though just gut-feeling, I'd assume well before the War of the Ancients. The Mogu were created when the Titans were fighting the Old Gods, which means there has to have been enough time for the Mogu to get afflicted by the Curse of Flesh, build their empire, get overthrown by the other Pandarian races, and for a lasting Pandarian Empire to exist for Shaohao to be the last emperor at the time of the War of the Ancients.)
There really isn't a solid timeline for most of the events that took place before the War of the Ancients - we don't know, for example, whether the first humans existed at that point or if there were only the Vrykul. And ambiguity is totally ok here - the mystery of just how things came together is part of the fun of the world, with Aqir like the Mantid even believing that the Titans were "Usurpers" who had taken Azeroth from the Old Gods, rather than the other way around.
For that matter, we don't know which came first, Azeroth or the Burning Legion.
The powers of the Titans are not precisely defined. For all we know, they could coalesce a bunch of space dust into a planet if they wanted, or they might have found a planet (probably already inhabited by elementals, but no real organic life.) It's clear, however, that they created most of if not all of the humanoid races, or at least their pre-Curse of Flesh ancestors.
Obviously, in the real world, human life didn't come about for billions of years - in fact, in Earth's 4.5 billion years, we've occupied only 200,000 years, which is 1/22,500 of that time. (And what we'd call civilization has only existed for a small fraction of those 200,000.)
Azeroth, however, was sculpted by the Titans and its life purposely engineered, and while you could argue that the Curse of Flesh and such things might be kind of the fantasy equivalent of evolution, it seems that those effects took place over course of single generations (or perhaps two or three.) What that boils down to is the fact that Azeroth, as we know it, might only be a couple hundred thousand years old.
The only really firm piece of evidence to deny this possibility is that we're told that Draenor is younger, geologically, than Azeroth. And while 200,000 years might be huge on a historical scale, and even large enough to be significant on a biological scale, it's negligible on a geological scale.
Still, if the Titans came to Azeroth not as a bunch of stellar dust but as an actual, existing planet, the planet's true age might not actually matter for this discussion. Azeroth might have been several billions of years old, but with no life (again, except elementals) before the Titans.
Looking at the Burning Legion, we're also a bit in the dark here. It's clear that the Man'ari Eredar are valued members of the Legion. Sargeras' chief lieutenants (they don't have real titles as far as I know, but I'd call them the "Consuls" of the Legion) are Eredar, and while there are certainly somer Eredar who are subservient to other demons like Nethrezim or Annihilan (Dreadlords and Pitlords, respectively,) it's clear that Eredar have real status.
The question, then, is whether status requires seniority. The induction of the Eredar into the Burning Legion is actually an event we can put a precise date on, because the Draenei remember it happening. The Draenei are, of course, also Eredar, (in a way, it might make more sense to refer to the demons as specifically "Man'ari," as the Draenei arguably have more of a claim to being true Eredar than their demonic kin.)
Sargeras came to Argus because the Eredar were masters of arcane magics, using it to build a utopian civilization. The Dark Titan offered to grant them even greater power - something the Eredar were either too naive or too greedy to realize would turn them evil (to be fair, Sargeras might have presented himself to them as a true Titan - given how advanced the Eredar had been, it's likely they had discovered the existence of the Titans, so when one of them came to them with an offer to take them to the next step in evolution, it might have seemed like the best possible idea.)
That happened twenty-five thousand years ago, which could theoretically still be pre-Azeroth (though again, given the talk about geological age, I'm not inclined to believe it,) but the induction of the Eredar is not necessarily the birth of the Legion.
Sargeras' first act of betrayal against his fellow Titans - the act that truly gave birth to the Burning Legion - was the destruction of the prison in which the Titans had been keeping the demons found in the Twisting Nether - demons who were locked away in said prison by Sargeras himself. The world of Mar'duun was shattered, and its inmates were allowed to stream out of it - before Sargeras bound them to his will and set about on his Burning Crusade. (Another ambiguity - do the demons serve Sargeras willingly, or is he controlling them through Titan magic?)
Again, we're left with one of these "how long between these events" questions. Was the Legion well-established when the Draenei fled Argus? Or was Argus the first stop after Mar'duun?
The reason that these questions are interesting is that it could potentially give us a lot more insight into why the Burning Legion exists, and why Sargeras is so obsessed with Azeroth.
The official story is that Sargeras had his mind-breaking moment after experiencing the evil of the Nethrezim (this was actually a retcon, as it had originally been the Eredar, but I think we're a lot better off with the Draenei existing, so I'm ok with it.) Essentially, without getting physically or magically corrupted by the Dreadlords, simply had an existential crisis in the face of that evil, deciding that the Titans' attempts to bring order to the universe were pointless, and that he would not allow them to continue. But while the Nethrezim are bad, the match-up I've always been curious about is Sargeras versus the Old Gods.
It would probably require another retcon or some serious "from a certain point of view" reasoning, but I've always thought it would be interesting if Sargeras had still been with the Pantheon in the fight against the Old Gods. But while the rest of the Pantheon wanted to preserve Azeroth, Sargeras was so disgusted by the Old Gods that he started employing Fel Magic to burn them away (I've written articles in the past about how Fel-affiliated things other than player Warlocks always seem to be immune to the Old Gods' manipulations.) Essentially, Sargeras, monster-hunter-in-chief, would rather destroy the universe than allow the Old Gods to have it. To him, the demons are the lesser of two evils.
Alternatively, there's a good explanation that would require the timeline to be reversed here. It's possible that Azeroth's purpose is to bring about a new Titan (Wrathion's "Final Titan,") to replace Sargeras after his fall to evil. The Titans were unwilling to destroy Azeroth, even after the catastrophic infection of the Old Gods, because they could not afford to lose the "child." Sargeras might envy this Final Titan, or perhaps fear that the Titans will somehow siphon his power into it, or simply believe that more Titans and more Order is the wrong direction for the universe, and so he desperately seeks to destroy our world to prevent the Final Titan from coming to life.
With Legion coming (sooner rather than later, I hope,) it sounds like we're actually going to be getting some answers to these questions. Demon Hunters will fight their way through the shattered remains of Mar'duun, and we've been told that the new Violet Hold will contain answers to questions about the creation of Azeroth itself.
It's pretty exciting, is what I'm getting at.
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