The Sabbat was founded in 1493, largely in reaction to the Convention of Thorns which founded the Camarilla. They are the remnants of the Anarch Revoltof the time.

Leaders of the endeavour were the Tzimisce and the Lasombra, two Clans that had ostensibly destroyed their Antediluvian founder and had accepted that there was no turning back for them. The Tzimisce would not cease their lands to the hated Tremere and submit the philosophy of Metamorphosism for the limited ideals of Humanity, while the Lasombra had invested too much in the Revolt to surrender their success to decrepit Elders of other Clans (in the words of the Clan representative at the Convention of Thorns: "I came to negotiate, not to surrender." Delegations of both Clans met at the island of Mallorca and began their own negotiations, aided by several malcontents among the Anarchs, who refused to surrender to the Elders or did not shared the view of their main Clan. Others joined to escape the practice of theBlood Bond, among them venerable Elders like the Malkavian Vasantasena, the Tremere Goratrix or the Ventrue Dominique Touraine.  These groups existed as small packs in the wilderness that harassed the holdings of the Elders and those who had submitted to the Camarilla, called "Sabbats" by the superstitious mortal population for their rapacious behaviour and proud display of their inhumanity. Slowly, these disparate packs were brought to heel by the spreading of the Vaulderie, uniting the remnants of the Anarch Revolt as the Sabbat, a sect devoted to warfare against the Antediluvians and the tyranny of their catspaws.

Bitter war raged between the vampires of the newly formed Sabbat and the not-much-older Camarilla. The Inquisition continued to claim victims while all of Europe’s Cainites drew lines in the sand to mark their allegiance. As the Camarilla consolidated their hold on the major European cities, the Sabbat was thrusted into the defensive. Within the Black Monastery in Switzerland, the sect formulized the modern Paths of Enlightenment in 1666 out of the old Roads that were no longer applicable. Despite open protests against it as a tool of the Antediluvians, the Sabbat Elders realized the worth of secrecy in the modern night and the real danger of falling into Wassail in the face of the demands of the Beast, so they sought to accommondate to these circumstances without pretending to be human.

Besides Spain, which was controlled by a majority of Lasombra, and territories in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, which were claimed by the Tzimisce, most packs traveled across the sea to the New World. For a while, the sect flourished in the evolving colonies. Amid a revolutionary and radical mortal backdrop, the Sabbat’s presence was easy to hide among the insurrectionists, fighting against the Cainite masters of the Aztecs, the dreaded monster Huitzilopochtli and his peers, as well as against the native Lupines. The relative prominence of the Sabbat faced opposition, though, as disenfranchised Camarilla vampires also journeyed across the oceans, hoping to carve out legacies for themselves away from the ironbound holdings of European princes. Due to a lack of organization of the American packs, internal struggle ensured between the Lasombra and Tzimisce that resulted in the events of the First Sabbat Civil War.

The war weakened the sect enough that the Camarilla was able to seize much teritory from them, before, after 30 years of conflict, the Purchase Pact officially forbade it to attack other Sabbat members in 1803. Cool heads never prevail in times of war however, and another wave of infighting broke out, which culminated in the Second Sabbat Civil War and was grounded in simmering animosities that still rumbled on beneath the Purchase Pact. Convening in New York, which the sect had managed to hold against all the best efforts of the Camarilla, high-ranking Sabbat reconsidered their commitment to the sect’s causes. Not content to merely sign a goodwill agreement as they had before, Sabbat vampires took a long, hard look at what was important to the Sword of Caine. An unheard-of congregation of Sabbat committed to document the Code of Milan in 1933, a collection of tenets that composed Sabbat ideology supposedly since the establishment of the sect. The new Code of Milan was approved by the new RegentMelinda Galbraith, as well as several Seraphim of the Black Hand. It also served to establish Mexico City as the informal capital of the Sabbat.

In the times of struggle, the Sabbat had managed to keep control of some major cities in the United States even through the internal war. Some cities, such as Philadelphia, remained under Sabbat domination because the Black Hand centralized most of its number in these locations. The dioceses in Europe remained untouched by the upheveals overseas. The Sabbat began to develop along two lines - city Kindred and nomadic Kindred. Many of the nomadic packs were Sabbat that fled their cities after defeat at the hands of the Camarilla or other Sabbat. The city Kindred maintained permanent havens and and further resembled their Camarilla counterparts in that they inserted themselves in the local infrastructure of the city, while the nomadic Kindred traveled all over the country, never existing in one place too long and upholding the old tenets of the ancient Anarchs.