Anyone who's even the least bit interested in Star Wars knows about the Jedi and their stoic ways. Yet in the original trilogy and the prequels, the Jedi Knights seem to be a smaller organization, with few agents ever seen and the entire population of "good" Force wielders in danger of being driven into extinction by various outside forces, including their philosophical rivals, the Sith. Thankfully, the Knights of the Old Republic chronology places it completely out of the timeline of the movies, to an era that's holds a much higher number of Jedi: the era of the Old Republic.
Spanning a 4,000 year long timeline, the era of the Old Republic begins after the fall of the original Sith Empire (5,000 years before "A New Hope") and continues until the very beginning of the Rise of the Empire (1,000 years before "A New Hope"). This is the era in which Bioware's original best-selling Star Wars game, Knights of the Old Republic, takes place and features a time where the Jedi are plentiful and powerful. Despite the portrayal of the Jedi in the original Bioware game (you only see a handful of Jedi), there are a fairly large number of Jedi throughout the galaxy.
Throughout the whole Star Wars expanded universe, almost every mention of the Jedi depicts them as the "watchdogs" or "police officers" of the galaxy. It seems that wherever there's a threat, a Jedi is more than ready to slip on the mantle of justice and fight against evil and oppression. While neither the novels nor the original Bioware game ever give exact numbers on the number of Jedi in the galaxy, it's apparent that there are enough of them to disperse across to the far reaches and either help out local populations or do their own sort of research.
On top of that, the Jedi are also noted scholar and philosophers, so it's not without reason to assume that a vast number of Jedi are not roaming the galaxy but instead are holed up in a library some where, finding out the origins of their past. Were there more Jedi Knights on Coruscant than those shown in the Jedi Council chambers in the movies? Absolutely. According to the StarWars.com website some 200 Jedi were still available during the Clone Wars, a number that was "spread thin."
The Jedi ability to use the Force inexplicably began to diminish. This, coupled with increasing violence in the galaxy sparked by a Separatist movement overburdened the valiant protectors. Their ranks were spread thin trying to maintain the peace, and many Jedi fell during the crisis. When it came to war, and the first shots of the Clone Wars were fired on Geonosis, only a scant 200 Jedi were readily available for the conflict.
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