Assassin’s Creed is a sprawling, multi-platform universe that follows the story of two battling factions and their fight that spans thousands of years. Those two factions, the Assassins and the Templars, include real-life, notable figures such as Leonardo de Vinci, Jack the Ripper, Cesare Borgia, Cleopatra, and Queen Victoria, as well as the numerous fictional protagonists. On top of the Assassins and Templars, there are also new god-like figures called Isu and multiple calamitous events within the world of Assassin’s Creed that affect the characters and their stories.
Assassin’s Creed is mostly a series of video games, with novels, a movie, and a developing TV show acting as accompaniments to the games’ main story. There are two ways to approach the timeline: by game release date and by in-game chronology. For the sake of clarity, I will be using the chronological timeline to better align it with our own history.
The world of Assassin’s Creed turns on two different hinges: the battle between the Assassins and the Templars as well as interference from the god-like Isu.
The battle between the Assassins and the Templars started in 431 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War. While neither side had officially been established, proto-Templars and Assassins were operating while the war went on. The Templars, at this time, were called the Cult of Kosmos, and they were hoping to prolong the Peloponnesian War for their own gain by manipulating both of its sides. Their efforts were stopped by the first proto-Assassin: a superpowered misthios named Kassandra of Sparta. Kassandra’s “demigod” bloodline (she was descended from the Leonidas of Sparta, who was, in turn, descended from the Isu) was carried down to Ancient Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy XIII, and the Cult of Kosmos, in that time, reemerged and called itself the Order of the Ancients. Two new proto-Assassins, Bayek and Aya, were the ones to stop them, and in doing so, they created the Hidden Ones, the organization that would eventually become the iconic Assassin Brotherhood. From then on, the Assassins and the Templars took their fight worldwide, battling each other in the shadows of society for the next two thousand years.
Why are the Assassins and the Templars fighting each other, you may ask? The answer is this: they are two sides of the same coin, both fighting for world peace, and their fight comes from their differing opinions on how to achieve it. The Templars wish for world peace through complete control and subjugation of the world, while the Assassins wish for peace through freedom of choice. One of the most important parts about this fight is that neither side is technically “right.” As well as using immoral means to get what they want, both sides are fighting with absolutes that are overall not conducive to achieving their goal. What is needed in the world of Assassin’s Creed to achieve world peace is not absolute anarchy or complete totalitarianism, but rather a blend of both.
What exacerbates this fight? What’s kept it going for more than two thousand years? The Isu.The Isu are god-like figures that are also called “the ones who came before.” Their presence contributes to the canon of the gods that we now know, like Juno, Odin, Anubis, and Poseidon, among others. The Isu, during their time of power around 77,000 years ago, created objects called “Pieces of Eden” to use as mass subjugation devices against another one of their creations: humanity. But, through years of inter-racial breeding, so to speak, between humans and Isu, there began to be humans born that weren’t affected by the Pieces of Eden and their mind-controlling technology, and those humans eventually revolted against the Isu in a war called the Human-Isu War (such an original name). Such a revolt could be seen as the beginning of the Assassin and Templar ideologies: in this case, the resistant humans are the Assassins and the Isu are the Templars.
While the Human-Isu War went on, the Isu were unable to expect a massive solar flare hurtling towards Earth. Despite the scientific efforts of the Isu, they were too late, and the solar flare decimated most of the Isu and humans on Earth in an event called the Toba Catastrophe. After the Catastrophe, both humans and Isu began to rebuild, but the Isu never gained back the strength that they had before the war and thus dwindled away into myth and legend. The humans, however, used the Pieces of Eden to create their own societies, and the rest is history.
Not all humans are resistant to the power of the Pieces of Eden, so those who were in this transition period assumed the first positions of power. Over time, the Pieces of Eden were hidden away into vaults, citadels, and temples all over the world (and even on the moon!) through both human and the remaining Isu influence. In the present day, the Assassins and the Templars are fighting over those Pieces of Eden. The more Pieces of Eden a side has, the stronger they become and the easier it becomes to achieve their goal.
In the modern day, the Assassins have been driven underground through multiple slaughters and genocides at the hands of the Templars, who built the company Abstergo and have ascended to become an international business empire. The Templars, through Abstergo, now control almost all facets of human existence, from entertainment mediums like the Animus to food supply and medicine production. They use their products to propagandize people’s perception of history: emphasizing the importance of order and telling the glory tales of the Templars while scrubbing away almost all Assassin influence. At the same time, the Assassins are nothing more than rats in the world’s gutters, hiding in the shadows to survive. However, both groups’ motives remain the same: gain as many Pieces of Eden as possible in order to create world peace. However, neither side’s methods are peaceful and their end goals are ultimately unconducive: using a black and white, good versus evil mentality does not work to wrangle the complex creatures that are humans.
There is so much left to be told in terms of information, as the canon of the Assassins and Templars spans thousands of years and has both fictional and real-life figures within it. Assassins took up posts in Renaissance Italy, Dark Age Scandinavia, Victorian England, Ming Dynasty China, and Colonial America, just to name a few. So many characters, both Assassin and Templar, were pivotal to creating the story and universe that is Assassin’s Creed. But at the end of the day, while some of them may have been hailed heroes of their time, their path to becoming so wasn’t without excessive violence and bloodshed. Maybe one day, the Assassins and Templars can unite in order to foster a common good for humanity and prepare themselves for the battle ahead.
For their world, and ours, is so much bigger than this. It’s no longer just about the past, but also about a brighter, more peaceful, and safer future.
Discussion Questions:
- How do certain views of history affect the outcomes of the future? How can viewpoints about both history and the future be changed through the omission or rewriting of key historical details?
- To what extent can actions justify the means of accomplishing something? When is such a line crossed?
- What are some groups or organizations in our society that mirror the Assassins and the Templars?
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