Ciao e Benvenuti to my (OLD VIDEO NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE).
In this feature we’ll be departing from the usual recounts of history to do some epic
gaming - and recount some history - it’s kind of my thing.
We’ll be covering all sorts of games and their historical settings, seeing what they
got right, and the far more juicy, what they got wrong.
So what better way to kick off this series than following up from my previous coverage
on Assassin’s Creed 1 with Assassin’s Creed 2.
Now I’ve been a longtime fan of the Assassin’s Creed series, initially starting with Brotherhood,
and been with it through the thick and the awful lot of thin the series has produced.
The first sequel to Assassin’s Creed is over twice the length of the initial game,
bringing with it a lot of fun, a lot of slog, and a lot more history to dig into.
We’re placed in the modern shoes of Desmond Miles, Nolan North’s 2nd or 3rd most popular
himbo in gaming.
The narrative puts us in the Animus 2.0; a device that lets Desmond experience the life
of his ancestor Ezio Auditore da Firenze in only a matter of days - or in my case, 19
hours of straight gameplay, because the grind is real..
The game spans across 40 years of history in 15th century renaissance Italy, which I
didn’t realise until I finished it, it’s still weird to think it spans 40- it spanned
40 years?
Okay.
In those 40 years we get to explore Florence, Forli, Venice, and more.
We meet and kill several famous noble families of the time, and a countless amount of guards
telling us to get off the damn roofs.
The game’s central focus is the main character, Ezio, and how he grows and develops.
So like half of all similar stories, we start with his birth in 1459.
It’s a bit strange that Ezio would remember his birth, but there’s also a part you play
as a sperm so- who knows.
Ezio is born into the completely fictional Auditore family, a recently ennobled family
of bankers in Florence.
At this time in Italy’s history it wasn’t Italy, it was in fact a bunch of city states.
With notable duchies and republics like Milan, Genoa, Florence, Siena, and Venice, not to
mention the all important Papal States which controlled Rome and a large portion of central
Italy.
I’ve missed a bunch more places on the peninsular, but the game only visits a few of the states
I’ve mentioned.
A great deal of these places were either de facto or directly controlled by powerful noble
families, whose interests included amassing wealth, walks on the beach, and warfare.
The game chooses to take place in the peak of Italy’s artistic and architectural renaissance,
delving into the midst of powerful rivaling families who eventually declined their own
renaissance with destructive wars in the mid 16th century.
So immersed in this world Ezio gets involved in Romeo and Juliet style street brawls, runs
across very aesthetic rooftops, and through his mother gets to meet Da Vinci?
Leonardo Da Vinci is played as the handsome charismatic guy history describes him as,
but any mention of his controversial homosexuality and charges of sodomy against him are relegated
to a DLC in the next game.
As large a part Da Vinci plays in Assassin’s Creed 2, he’s more or less just the guy
that makes cool mission set pieces and produces wildly futuristic weapons for Ezio.
The Auditore family becomes embroiled in noble rivalry.
Allied with the Medici, the de facto heads of Florence, they become the target of the
Pazzi.
The Gonfaloniere of Florence, the fictional Uberto Alberti, frames the Auditore resulting
in the execution of Ezio’s father and brothers.
The concept of the gonfaloniere having the power to independently execute an ally of
the Medici is a bit far fetched, but further fetched is the main plot of the game.
The Pazzi and the Gonfaloniere are members of the Templar order, striking against the
Auditore who are Assassins.
Now both of these historical orders had met their end by the 15th century.
The King of France had the Templars destroyed by the papacy in the early 14th century, and
the historical Nizari Order of Assassins had seen their fortresses sacked in 1260 by the
Mongols and their members dispersed across the Muslim world.
The lore of Assassin’s Creed acknowledges these events, explaining that these are secret
secular societies that have existed for centuries prior to the crusades and continue to exist
to the modern day.
But it must be said, while the first game took historical groups and fictionalised major
elements of them, in Assassin’s Creed 2 and every game from there on, the Assassin
Brotherhood and Templar Order are trademarked property of Ubisoft baby, cause they made
them up.
So after the summary execution of Ezio’s male relatives, the Auditore escape to Monteriggioni
to meet Uncle Mario
it’s a me, Mario.
He accurately explains Monteriggioni’s friendly and hostile history with Florence, but when
we arrive at the tiny walled town, it’s unrealistically tiny, and in place of any
of Monteriggioni’s famous churches we have the fictional Villa Auditore.
It is within the walls of Monteriggioni that Ezio is told he comes from a line of assassins,
a brotherhood of highly skilled agents that work to combat the Templar Order and secure
the freedom of the people.
The Auditore family owe their riches to being mentored by fellow Assassin, Marco Polo, who
in his secret quest to secure freedom for people… owned slaves?
Well anyway, that’s why Ezio needs to go to back to Florence, as the Pazzi are seeking
to overthrow the Medici, and he must stop them from disempowering a family of corrupt
bankers that also own slaves… uh, Assassin’s we need to talk.
Now 1478, the game introduces us to the Pazzi Conspiracy against the Medici, which is real,
and to be honest the game downplays it.
The conspirators; Francesco and Jacopo de’Pazzi, Bernardo Baroncelli, Stefano Bagnone, Archbishop
Salviati, and Antonio Maffei - that’s all accurate, unlike my pronunciations.
However they are shown to all be Templars abiding by the will of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia,
who is real, but also really not involved in this.
The conspiracy’s actual ringleaders were Girolamo Riario, who is an entirely off-screen
character in the game, and his uncle Pope Sixtus.
The pope gives his support, as long as no one dies
If you consider instructing “do whatever is necessary” as “don’t kill”, sure.
The real history of the Pazzi Conspiracy was that of the Pope’s nepotism - the Medici
bank refused to back the Pope’s purchase of Imola for his nephew because the Medici
wanted to buy it themselves.
The Pope got the town by marrying Girolamo to Caterina Sforza, and he colluded with the
Pazzi who wished to take the Medici’s place.
Instead though the game drags the Borgia into the whole thing, which is a bit strange.
Lorenzo de’Medici and his brother Giuliano were the targets of the conspiracy.
Lorenzo is wounded and Giuliano dies in the attack at the cathedral as the city descends
into chaos.
Lorenzo somewhat reluctantly has Ezio assassinate the Pazzi conspirators over a matter of months,
but in reality the conspirators were executed in days, and far more brutally.
Jacopo de’Pazzi was brought back to Florence shortly after the conspiracy failed where
he was tortured and hanged next to the decomposing body of Archbishop Salviati, then he was buried,
then dug up, thrown in a ditch, dragged through the street, propped up at the door of his
own palazzo where his head was used as a door knocker, then he was thrown into the Arno
river, retrieved by children, hung from a willow tree, flogged, and thrown back into
the river… the stabbing doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
The Pope had the city excommunicated for their execution of the Archbishop, and the city’s
clergy excommunicated the pope back.
This almost descended into an all-out war until Lorenzo sweet talked a peace with the
King of Naples.
As much as Lorenzo was perhaps a shrewd negotiator, the truth is his depiction in Assassin’s
Creed 2 is pretty flattering.
This mature and fierce statesman was actually only 10 years Ezio’s elder, and an infamous
playboy known to flaunt his or the city’s wealth constantly.
The game suffers from wanting this black and white dynamic of good and bad, sanitising
many of its figures and even its locations to fit this.
Ezio is taken to Venice in his pursuit of Rodrigo Borgia, and hidden within the serene
city’s beautiful architecture is anti-semetism, slave ownership, and racism - and I mean really
hidden because the game never shows it.
Ezio meets with an array of Venice’s heroic thieves, whores, and mercenaries as he murders
his way through the real life Barbarigos family.
Despite the setting, absent is the presence of jews and the yellow armbands they were
forced to wear, nor any mention of their restrictions against living in the city.
We also don’t see any slaves in Venice, or any of the racism against slavic people,
y’know slavs, where the word slave comes from?
Instead Ezio’s band of misfits rather just shake their fists at concepts of classism,
which is an incredibly progressive mindset for the late 15th century.
Ezio assassinates the fictional Emilio and Silvio Barbarigo, and the factual Doge, Marco
Barbarigo, who really did die in 1486, but not by getting stabbed up publicly by a stage-play
dressed assassin.
He extracts information from them all, which is decently impressive, as Ezio’s Tuscan
dialect is not the most mutually intelligible with the Barbarigo’s Venetian dialects.
Dialects is mostly a misnomer, as these are distinct languages, but Ubisoft simplifies
by giving the character’s cheesy Italian accents and dropping in standard modern Italian
swears and expressions.
The game culminates in Ezio’s dramatic stand off with Rodrigo Borgia over the Mcguffin
of Eden, where suddenly the game realises they wanted a few more hours of playtime and
Rodrigo just runs off?
It’s then a 19 year old Niccolo Macciavelli shows up to formally induct Ezio into the
Assassin brotherhood - yeah I think the devs forgot Macciavelli is still a student in Florence
at this point.
Regardless all Ezio’s friends and family found the time in their busy schedules to
make the 7 day trip to Venice and gather around to tell him he’s now an Assassin, despite
wearing assassin robes, and using assassin equipment, and following assassin doctrine
the whole game doing assassin missions - uuuuuh.
Back on the story mission grind Ezio is brought to Forli, with plenty of actual historical
moments going on.
The Orsi twins are real figures that did assassinate Girolamo Riario, though certainly not at Caterina
Sforza’s command and I would’ve hoped with a bit more build up than “Oh yeah he
was a templar, we got him killed”.
The Orsi holding Caterina’s children hostage and their exchange.
Well, they’re founded in rumours, but I wouldn’t call that inaccurate.
There wasn’t a big dramatic siege either, but without one how else could the game have
convened an excuse for Ezio to lose the Mcguffin of Eden to a random passing monk.
The random monk however is Girolamo Savonarola, who by 1485, was a well known preacher in
Florence for his sermons.
In the game this crazed friar uses the Apple of Eden to control the minds of the Florentine
elites and take control of the city for himself in 1494.
However in reality, no mind control would be necessary.
Lorenzo had watched over the collapse of the Medici Bank in the 1480s, he then tapped into
the city’s wealth to fund his own lavish lifestyle.
Savonarola denounced the city’s corruption, despotic rule, and its exploitation of the
poor.
When the King of France threatened to attack the city in his invasion of the peninsula,
it was Savonarola who personally secured peace for the city.
After this the Medici were expelled and Savonarola urged the creation of a popular republic.
Savonarola was a puritanical ruler, yes, but it was incredibly popular in the city.
Ezio didn’t turn the people against Savonarola, instead it was Rodrigo Borgia, coronated as
Pope Alexander VI, that deposed Savonarola and reinstated the Medici - talk about the
irony.
So after these two grueling DLCs that were later shoved into the main game and having
to collect every single codex page across the map Ezio now gets to take on his ultimate
mission, to kill the Pope!
Ezio must combine his mcguffin with the Pope’s mcguffin to unlock the vault because, well,
the plot said so.
So entering the Sistine Chapel sans Michaelangelo’s art, nice touch, Ezio dukes it out with Rodrigo
Borgia in a duel of precursor magic for Ezio to ultimately spare him because screw you
guys, Pope Alexander dies in 1503, not 1499.
The vault is opened, the precursor people show up, exposition dump, sequel hook, roll
credits, and 19 hours of straight gameplay is finished, whooo!
So ultimately what can be said about Assassin’s Creed 2?
A game immersed in cliche, one that depicts a war of long dead and outdated organisations,
and trips up on a plethora of historical facts - well I think it’s great.
I think Assassin’s Creed 2 achieves many of the things it set out to do, and that a
lot of games at the time weren’t doing.
Still to this day there is no other story game set in Renaissance Italy, unless you
count Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, because you’re a smartass.
However with the game's premise it’s clear it dug itself a hole when it chose a good
side and a bad side of history.
I don’t think one of the historical figures named in this video is a good person - they’re
all incredibly flawed figures, most historical figures are.
But as long as we treat Assassin’s Creed 2 as the entertainment piece that it is, and
not the historical educational piece that it isn’t, then it’s pretty good - but
I swear if I have to fucking do those DLC missions again-
I have to give a massive credit to Reddit user VestigialLlama4 whose personal research
was incredibly helpful to producing this video, you can go to his original post in the description
and give it the love it deserves.