The 10 Most Historically Inaccurate Characters In Assassin's Creed Games

10 Most Historically Inaccurate Characters in Assassin’s Creed Games

Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we’re counting down our picks for the historical figures where Ubisoft clearly didn’t do enough research.

Christopher Columbus

“Assassin’s Creed II: Discovery” (2009)

While a lot of people likely missed “Assassin’s Creed II: Discovery” on the DS, if you did play it, you may have been baffled at the way Christopher Columbus is handled. No longer is he the man who wrought so much suffering in the Americas, but he’s a friendly ally of the Assassins. He ends up being a target of the Borgias, so Ezio rescues him, but as with many other figures, being against the Borgias doesn’t make someone a moral person. Ezio actually ends up helping Columbus put his expedition together, even though the brutality Columbus would perpetrate later in his life is surely against everything the Assassins stand for, the same Assassins who would go on to try and end the slave trade.

Charles Lee

“Assassin’s Creed III” (2012)

Lee and Washington did disagree extensively about Washington’s military choices, though Lee didn’t initially have strong objections to Washington becoming Commander in Chief instead. After a chaotic retreat during the Battle of Monmouth, Lee’s vendetta against Washington grew – but he did not, as far as anybody knows, join a secret society devoted to destroying Washington and other enemies within the Continental Army. His public disdain of Washington eventually got him dismissed from the army entirely, after which point he stopped his machinations and bred dogs until his death. There was no last-minute chase through a burning ship in Boston, nor was he executed in a pub in Philadelphia.

Mary Read

“Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag” (2013)

It’s well known that notorious pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read DID dress as men, with both of them doing so while serving on the ship of Jack Rackham, AKA Calico Jack, who also appears in “Black Flag”. However, not only does Anne Bonny not dress as a man in the game, but Mary Read is disguised as James Kidd, the alleged son of Captain William Kidd. This part of history is not true, Read never pretended to be Kidd’s son that we know of. Interestingly, some historical sources suggest that the two weren’t trying to disguise themselves as men, but were simply wearing more comfortable men’s clothes – though other sources dispute this. We’ll likely never know.

Niccolò Machiavelli

“Assassin’s Creed II” (2009) & “Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood” (2010)

Would Machiavelli have been an Assassin if the Assassins were real? Probably not, and for one reason and one reason alone: he was a huge admirer of Cesare Borgia. It’s widely believed that his most famous work, “The Prince”, which explores treachery in political life, is about Cesare. “Brotherhood” does suggest that Machiavelli can’t be trusted, with La Volpe falling for evidence that suggests he’s a traitor. Ezio finds out that Machiavelli is innocent and saves his life. Machiavelli also continued to live and work in Florence after the Medicis were finally exiled, which is also in opposition to the games since the Medicis are key allies of the Assassins and the Auditores in particular.

The Marquis de Sade

“Assassin’s Creed Unity” (2014)

The less you know about the crimes the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned for the better, but among them were the performance of obscene acts using a crucifix and dozens of assaults, ending up arrested or imprisoned half a dozen times. Arno meets Sade early in the game, though he doesn’t know it’s him, during the Storming of the Bastille - but in real life, though Sade WAS imprisoned there, he’d already been transferred away ten days previously. It’s also hard to believe that, despite Sade’s political connections, Arno would ever work with him. Sade asks Arno to assassinate a brothel owner who’s been mistreating his girls, too, which hardly tracks with the crimes he was found guilty of or his philosophies.

Karl Marx

“Assassin’s Creed Syndicate” (2015)

Ubisoft is infamous for claiming its complex, historical epics are divorced from politics – so, what happens when a company with that kind of ethos decides to put Karl Marx in one of its games? Well, it’s bizarre, to say the least. Marx appears in a few side missions in “Syndicate” – some of the glitchiest in the whole game – and talks to the Fryes extensively about how he believes the true route to socialism is via democracy, disagreeing with the violent tactics of some of his followers. This isn’t exactly accurate, though; Marx generally believed that only through revolution could true democracy be achieved. “True democracy” in this case meant the right to vote for all men at least, so they were planning to revolt to gain the vote, which they still didn’t get in Britain until 1918.

Cesare Borgia

“Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood” (2010)

All of the Borgias are likely to be very inaccurate since all the negative stories about them come from slanderous accusations made by other Italian nobles who didn’t like them. Cesare, though, may be the worst affected. There’s no evidence that he and Lucrezia had an incestuous relationship, for instance, and he was also a highly effective military leader. By the end of his life, though, he always wore a leather mask in public almost certainly to hide the symptoms of syphilis. He also didn’t die nobly in battle; he was ambushed, alone, by enemy soldiers, and stabbed to death by spears before being stripped. Ezio would never dishonor an opponent by doing that, though.

Julius Caesar

“Assassin’s Creed Origins” (2017)

By the end of “Origins”, Caesar has arrived and become a puppet of the Order of the Ancients, essentially doing everything Septimius and Flavius tell him. His death on the Aides of March, orchestrated by Assassins including Brutus, is portrayed as a victory for the people – but how accurate is this to Caesar in real life? Well, not very, as in reality, Caesar remained extremely popular in Rome. His military campaigns were brutal and devastating, even by contemporary standards, but in Rome, he enacted populist policies and oversaw many reforms to the Roman Republic that would have helped ordinary people. Because of this, some have argued that it makes more sense in reality for Caesar to be aligned with the Assassins, not Brutus.

Napoleon Bonaparte

“Assassin’s Creed Unity” (2014)

One of the early contradictions between Napoleon in real life versus in “Unity” is, as with many of the characters, his accent. Like the rest of the Frenchmen, he speaks with an English accent. In reality, Napoleon was from Corsica and routinely mocked by the French for his rough way of speaking, until he eventually won them over with his charm; so, it would have made more sense to give him a different accent from all the other characters. “The Dead Kings” DLC gets stranger, though, by having him be a villain with an Apple of Eden. We already knew that he had one thanks to “Assassin’s Creed II”, but he turns into a monster too soon than reasonably makes sense, since “Dead Kings” is still set in the 1790s.

Jack the Ripper

“Assassin’s Creed Syndicate” (2015)

You could argue that since Jack the Ripper was never caught, it’s hard to dispute much of what “Syndicate” says. But the “Jack the Ripper” DLC is so beyond the realm of possibility that it’s hard to believe that any of it could be accurate. In-game, Jack the Ripper is a former Assassin, whose motivation for killing women is that those women are actually Assassins themselves. That makes enough sense as a premise, but what about Jack the Ripper’s personal prison he’s running in two decaying prison hulks? That’s just baffling. As well as that, by 1888, there were no more prison hulks in Britain, left to rot or otherwise; and all the ones in Deptford specifically had sunk or been broken up as early as the 1840s.

Let us know in the comments which historical figures you think needed some more research.