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00:00Welcome to Mojo Plays and today we're looking at 30 of the most fascinating historical events recreated in Assassin's Creed.
00:15Before we begin, we publish new content all week long, so be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos.
00:33The Battle of Qyberon Bay, Assassin's Creed Rogue
00:37While all of the European powers operating in the Americas at this time were committing their fair share of atrocities, in the world of Assassin's Creed, the British and Spanish are on the side of the Templars, while the French are allies with the Assassins.
00:56When Rogue takes you to the Templar side of the conflict, Shay spends a lot of his time helping the Royal Navy throughout the Seven Years' War in the North Atlantic.
01:09One optional engagement is the Battle of Qyberon Bay in 1759, in which the Royal Navy triumphed over France and ended France's time as a key naval power.
01:18This is the site of one of Rogue's legendary ship battles as Shay sinks the Formidable.
01:31Louisiana Rebellion of 1768, Assassin's Creed III Liberation
01:37This Spanish governor has placed so many restrictions on trade, even plantation owners are practically begging for an excuse to riot.
01:44Nine years on from Qyberon Bay, and French control throughout the Americas was waning.
01:49As part of the Treaties of Fontainebleau and Paris, France's colonies in Louisiana were ceded to Spain.
01:54But the French Creoles and New Orleans didn't want to be part of the Spanish Empire, so they rebelled in 1768.
02:00Look around, old man. Your hired hands will flee at the first sign of trouble.
02:07Aye, but the lady's temper alone could take on an army.
02:11In Liberation, we find out that the rebellion was organized by Aveline de Grandpré to create an opportunity to interrogate the Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa.
02:20Through de Ulloa, Aveline learns that the Templars are excavating Isu artifacts in Chichen Itza.
02:25The rebellion failed, but Aveline got what she wanted.
02:29I will turn my back now and walk away.
02:31If you would like to keep your life, you will remove yourself from this continent, never to be seen again.
02:37Thank you. Thank you for your mess.
02:40The Haitian Revolution. Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag
02:44You know well the grounds of the governor's residence.
02:47Choose your moment. Do not get caught.
02:51Black Flag's standalone DLC, Freedom Cry, took us to Haiti, which was always on the base game's map but largely inaccessible.
02:58It's set in the 1730s, 16 years before the successful Haitian Revolution began, but sees Adewale laying the seeds for rebellion as he works to free slaves in the French colony.
03:13Known as Saint-Domingue at the time, it was a leading producer of sugar made via brutal slave labor on plantations.
03:20It's a little anachronistic, but it shows the decades of violence and buildup that eventually led to the Haitian Revolution, which remains the most successful slave revolt in modern history.
03:29But they're not even human.
03:31Without the discipline and guidance of their masters, they turn to rebellion.
03:36Murder. Like you.
03:39Samhain. Assassin's Creed Valhalla
03:42It's hardly a disguise. Just a cloak and some bones.
03:47Nonsense. You are the very spirit of the Mary Louved.
03:51This isn't one historical event, but a traditional pagan celebration which still exists today as Halloween.
03:57Beginning thousands of years ago, Samhain is a festival marking the beginning of winter, but is also associated with the supernatural, as doorways to the Otherworld, the Land of Spirits, opened.
04:07In Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Ivor goes to Gloucester and partakes in many traditional activities, including going trick-or-treating, known as guising.
04:15Trick-or-treat!
04:17What business have you?
04:19Oh, the Mary Louved.
04:21Right, right. We're doing cakes instead of beer this year.
04:24You also get to see old-fashioned jack-o'-lanterns made of turnips, not pumpkins.
04:28This is because pumpkins aren't native to the British Isles, so they weren't available to Gaelic and Celtic cultures at the time, which is unfortunate because pumpkins are much easier to carve.
04:38The arc culminates with another gruesome tradition, as the Elderman is burned alive in a wicker man.
04:44Ah! Ah! Ah!
04:49Honnoji Incident, Assassin's Creed Shadows
05:00We haven't seen this play out yet, but it's certainly going to be a key event in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
05:05One of the two leads is Yasuke, a samurai under Oro Nobunaga, known as the Great Unifier of Japan.
05:11Nobunaga ultimately died in 1582 after one of his most loyal servants.
05:15We're not sure whether Nobunaga will be a Templar leader or potentially Mitsuhide, but since Shadows takes place in the final years of the Sengoku period...
05:32This is definitely going to be covered in the game.
05:34We'd even go as far to say it will be part of the game's climactic ending sequence.
05:42The Zanj Uprising, Assassin's Creed Mirage
05:59Slavery has existed for thousands of years and was utilized by the Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle East.
06:04In Mirage, Basim is soon tasked with freeing the leader of the Zanj Rebellion, Ali ibn Muhammad from Damascus Gate Prison.
06:11Ali and his rebels might be useful to the Assassin cause as they try to eradicate the Templars from Baghdad.
06:16Basim is skeptical of Ali, who questions whether Basim is truly free under the Creed as he claims to be or whether he is blindly following an ideology.
06:24I will find who did this and I will kill them all. You have my word.
06:30Basim is right. Let him do this.
06:33As we know from Valhalla, Basim will eventually start using the Assassins for his own ends as he tries to reunite with his lover whose consciousness is trapped in the Staff of Hermes.
06:42And Basim, work quickly. You see what is at stake.
06:48The Ghost Club, Assassin's Creed Syndicate
06:51Bloody drood! I'll never finish it at this rate.
06:55Only Providence knows where those words are headed now.
06:59A lot of famous faces were active in London in the 1860s. Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Karl Marx, Arthur Conan Doyle, and of course, Charles Dickens.
07:08All of them need the Fry Twins' help at one point or another, but Dickens has some of the most entertaining side missions of all.
07:14Tell me, do you believe in ghosts? Not particularly.
07:18He wants the Frys to help him debunk London's many hauntings, to find out what's really going bump in the night.
07:24This is all completely true. In real life, Dickens was a founding member of the Ghost Club, whose members exposed fraudulent psychics and phony hauntings, all of which were lucrative scams taking advantage of suspicious Victorians.
07:35The Ghost Club's reputation has grown tremendously. We are a beacon of reason in a world beguiled by superstition.
07:45The Siege of Acre, Assassin's Creed
07:56This port city was fought over during the Crusades for hundreds of years and was besieged as recently as 1799 by the French.
08:02But we're talking about the 1189-1191 Siege of Acre, which is the one affecting the city when Altaïr visits.
08:09A little bird told me you'd be paying a visit.
08:12Al Mualim has ordered the execution of Garnier de Naplouse.
08:15Though control of the city changed hands many times, at this point it was under the control of Saladin, though it's eventually occupied by Crusaders yet again before the game ends.
08:24You can see Crusader influence everywhere in the city. It even has a vast European cathedral, though the cathedral's Gothic architectural style is not historically accurate.
08:33Acre is the most blighted city in the entire game, with its citizens suffering greatly due to the war.
08:38Rumors speak of atrocities committed within its walls. It seems the good doctor enjoys experimenting on innocent citizens.
08:45The Peloponnesian War, Assassin's Creed Odyssey
08:56The oldest said game in the series remains Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which takes us to the 5th century BC.
09:01Greece is not yet a unified country and is instead dominated by various city-states, namely Athens and Sparta.
09:07The two vie for control of the archipelago both on land and at sea, with Sparta generally having land dominance while Athens was a naval power.
09:14Throughout Odyssey, Cassandra plays both sides.
09:24While she's Spartan by birth, she makes key allies in Athens throughout the game and you can turn the tide of the war in whichever direction you choose.
09:30No region is permanently held for one side however, giving you endless battles to fight.
09:37Execution of Louis XVI, Assassin's Creed Unity
09:56The last king of France before the revolution is only a minor player in Unity, hardly seen until we arrive at his execution in 1793.
10:04Arnaud wants to use the king's execution as an opportunity to get the game's main villain, François-Thomas Jarmain.
10:09He's unsuccessful in his assassination because Jarmain knows he's coming, but Jarmain does explain why he's been purging the Templar order from within and why he killed de La Serre at the start of the game.
10:19Louis also addresses the crowd on his way to the guillotine and his last words are those given by the executioner's real-life account of the event in a letter.
10:45The Great Fire of New York, Assassin's Creed III
10:50By the time Connor arrives in New York, the city has already been ravaged by the Great Fire of 1776.
10:59While we don't see the fire happen itself, its effects are far-reaching.
11:03Much of the lower west side of Manhattan was destroyed, making the situation for New Yorkers even worse considering they were, by this point, living under British occupation.
11:12Connor has his work cut out trying to help the people trying to live in the burned districts.
11:23Though people have theorized for hundreds of years that the fire was caused by arson, it's still unknown and Ubisoft didn't decide to blame any particular side.
11:32Interestingly, you were supposed to see the fire happen originally, but it was too difficult for Ubisoft to pull off.
11:43The Cult of Reason, Assassin's Creed Unity
11:51You may miss the significance of this if you're not already a fan of French Revolution history.
11:56But when Arno conducts his assassination mission in Notre Dame Cathedral early on in Unity, the cathedral is not in possession of the church.
12:03As part of the revolution, the Jacobin government at the time de-Christianized France, which led to the rise of the Cult of Reason, an extremist, atheist religion sponsored by the National Convention that was given control of Notre Dame.
12:21The cathedral was vandalized and occupied by the cult, which eventually became so extreme that the government was forced to disavow it and create a new one, the Cult of the Supreme Being.
12:30Notre Dame is in this unfortunate condition during most of Unity.
12:42The Seven Years War, Assassin's Creed Rogue
12:45God had nothing to do with this.
12:51This complex period in world history was covered by Assassin's Creed Rogue, with Shay and his fellow Templars aligned with the British this time, primarily fighting French ships on the high seas.
13:01The huge war had ramifications for the entire planet and is what led to the French territories in Canada eventually coming under British control.
13:09Ran them right out of their own den.
13:11I was looking for a new place to live.
13:14It changed the balance of power forever, and from the war, the British became the strongest imperial force on Earth, largely ending the age in which Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal were all vying for control of the land and seas.
13:26And maybe Shay Cormac sinking all those French ships so he could upgrade his puckle guns was the reason the British won, this time.
13:38The Siege of Paris, Assassin's Creed Valhalla
13:45Don't scar the lands of England.
13:49Ubisoft deemed this event so noteworthy that an entire DLC of Assassin's Creed Valhalla was built around it.
13:55In the year 885 AD, Vikings sailed along the River Seine to arrive at Paris, which was already a major city by this point.
14:03For nearly a year, Paris was besieged by the Viking invaders, with King Charles III, better known as Charles the Fat, leading the Franks in their defense.
14:15Whether the Vikings won or lost the siege depends on who you ask, and Valhalla seems to show their ultimate defeat in a different light.
14:25While they never did breach Paris truly, Charles the Fat eventually paid them off and sent them away to attack nearby Burgundy instead.
14:38Paul Revere's Midnight Ride, Assassin's Creed III
14:45On April 19th, 1775, the American Revolutionary War officially broke out, with British and Patriot forces clashing in the Battle of Lexington and Concord.
14:57But during the previous night, the 18th, the colonial militias had been warned of the British approach by Paul Revere, who rode across Massachusetts to deliver the news.
15:07You take the reins, I'll navigate. Quickly, Connor, get on the horse!
15:12In the end, the Americans won and the war began.
15:15In Assassin's Creed III, Connor is the one riding the horse through the towns, directed by Revere after the two had already met during the Boston Tea Party.
15:22Revere turned out to be an irritating backseat driver, however, with Connor doing all the hard work.
15:28Connor, it's best you stay here and help our man John Parker hold the town. It'll give us time to spread the word.
15:35Bombing Raids, Assassin's Creed Syndicate
15:44The London Blitz during World War II is a well-known part of history, but did you know that German forces carried out bombing raids in the First World War as well?
15:51The war broke out only 11 years after the Wright Brothers' first successful flight, which meant most of these German raids were actually carried out by Zeppelins.
15:59In Assassin's Creed Syndicate, we see all this happen during the World War I side missions with Lydia Frye, who was enlisted to help in the war effort by Winston Churchill in 1916.
16:13Among other activities, she fights off those bombing raids and defends London from aerial attack.
16:25The Potsi Conspiracy, Assassin's Creed II
16:28Do you think me blind and deaf, son? I know all about your fight with Vieri di Pazzi last night, and then this little visit to Christina.
16:38In the 15th century, Italy still hadn't been unified. Instead, the peninsula was made up of large, independent states and cities, including Florence, the heart of the Renaissance, which was controlled by the Medici family.
16:50The Medici's are always allied with the other Tores in Assassin's Creed, though the latter didn't actually exist, to the extent that Ezio seeks revenge against the Pazzi's for conspiring to depose the Medici's.
17:04That, and the fact that the Pazzi conspirators were also to blame for the deaths of Ezio's father and brothers.
17:09In reality, the Pazzi conspirators were banished and practically erased from history after trying to publicly assassinate Lorenzo de' Medici.
17:20The 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet, Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag
17:27And there I am, a man of quality, with a thousand doubloons spilling from my pockets like drops of rain. I can see it.
17:37In 1715, a huge treasure fleet left the Americas to send vast amounts of gold and silver to Spain.
17:43And loaded onto one of those ships, having been taken prisoner, was notorious pirate Edward Kenway and his future quartermaster, Adewale.
17:51I'm Edward. Much thanks for your aid back there.
17:56The fleet was struck by a hurricane in the Caribbean Sea, with all the ships except one destroyed in the storm.
18:02In reality, this was a French ship, Le Griffon, while in Black Flag, the surviving ship is the one that becomes the Jackdaw.
18:09Edward later returns to the site of the wreckage to go diving.
18:12The remains of the treasure fleet are still some of the most valuable shipwrecks in the world, centuries later.
18:21The Thermidorian Reaction, Assassin's Creed Unity
18:25The French Revolution brought big changes, including restructuring the months of the year and the hours of the day to all be in multiples of ten.
18:37That's what gives the Thermodian Reaction its name.
18:40It was named after the new month it happened in, Thermidor, when Maximilian Robespierre was violently deposed.
18:46The Hotel de Ville was stormed, and somebody shot Robespierre in the jaw, Elise de la Serre, according to Ubisoft.
18:55He was then taken away and promptly executed, bringing the revolution into a new era, where the original Reign of Terror was replaced with the White Terror,
19:02and the Jacobin revolutionaries were now the targets of state violence instead of the perpetrators.
19:14The Battle of Thermopylae, Assassin's Creed Odyssey
19:18The Persians come to make slaves of us all. I have a better idea.
19:24Cassandra and Alexios are descendants of the great Spartan king, Leonidas I, who famously led an army of 300 Spartans to defend Greece against the invading Persian army, led by Xerxes.
19:34The Greeks were defeated by the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in the year 480 BC, with a few thousand Greek soldiers left. It wasn't actually 300.
19:42It was a day the Persians will never forget.
19:48They retreated, and Leonidas stayed to defend them, eventually losing the battle.
19:52It's this battle that Assassin's Creed Odyssey opens up with, and you actually play as Leonidas holding back Xerxes before you meet Cassandra or Alexios.
20:00Decades later, and they still wield Leonidas' broken spear.
20:03This is big, Leila. Do you really think it's the spear?
20:06This is the one. The book was almost right on top of it.
20:11The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, Assassin's Creed Rogue
20:22Portugal's capital city was practically destroyed by a debilitating earthquake in 1755, in a natural disaster that caused up to 50,000 deaths at the highest estimates.
20:31You experience the quake firsthand near the beginning of Assassin's Creed Rogue.
20:35It's triggered by Shae taking a piece of Eden from a vault beneath a city, and is the inciting incident that causes Shae to leave the Assassins.
20:42God had nothing to do with this.
20:44He decides that no organization that allows so many lives to be lost just for the sake of another Isu relic is worth his time, and defects to the Templars.
20:52The Lisbon Earthquake broke the streets apart and destroyed thousands of buildings, and is recreated in one of the franchise's best, and most tragic, platforming sections.
21:05The Battle of Chippenham, Assassin's Creed Valhalla
21:22One of the major antagonists of AC Valhalla is Alfred of Wessex, better known as Alfred the Great, one of England's most famous kings.
21:29Though history generally remembers Alfred the Great positively, hence the name, Valhalla took a different perspective, and that shows particularly in its vision of the Battle of Chippenham.
21:47This was a major battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Vikings, one which the Vikings ended up winning, seizing control of the entire region for some time.
21:55Eivor and the Raven Clan joined forces with the Great Heathen Army, which was the real army involved in the conflict, and take Wessex, though it was only set to be theirs for a few months.
22:10The Borgia Papacy, Assassin's Creed II, and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood
22:15One of the most notorious noble families to ever live, the Borgias have certainly been painted as villains by history, including when they appeared during the Ezio trilogy.
22:31Cesare Borgia is the main antagonist of Brotherhood, while his father Rodrigo takes control of the Vatican, becoming Pope Alexander VI.
22:46Today, it's not clear how much about the Borgias is true, and how much was slander invented by their rivals in European high society, but they did exist and also had control of Italy for a time.
22:56Being Spanish, they weren't particularly popular in Italy, and that's definitely something the games get right, since Ezio spends his time trying to oust them from power.
23:12The Third Crusade, Assassin's Creed
23:15Both the Assassin Brotherhood and the Knights Templar have their origins in the Crusades, despite both groups having existed for far longer according to the lore of later games, becoming the Hidden Ones and the Order of Ancients.
23:33But the very first game tackled the Crusades and their atrocities head on, pitting Altaïr against many of the Holy Land's most important figures, such as Richard the Lionheart.
23:46And when you're not eavesdropping on conversations in one of the three main cities, you'll be riding through war-torn no-man's land, just trying to get from one side to another without being taken out by a bloodthirsty crusader.
24:04The Plague of Athens, Assassin's Creed Odyssey
24:16In the year 430 BC, and for a few years subsequently, Athens was struck by a devastating plague that killed tens of thousands of people.
24:24In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, you witness the horrors of the plague outbreak, complete with a grey color filter on your screen, including the death of Athenian leader Pericles.
24:34At least I'm alive, though I can't say the same for my city.
24:38But Assassin's Creed still can't shed light on one of history's biggest mysteries, what was the disease that caused the devastating plague?
24:45It may have been the Black Death, but it's also been theorized to have been everything else from measles to Ebola, and some medical evidence suggests it might have even been typhoid.
24:54There is a blood fever. They say it's a curse and they need help from the gods.
25:00Blackbeard's Death, Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag
25:11You'll encounter many of history's most notorious pirates throughout Black Flag, including Anne Bonny, Mary Read, Black Bart, and of course, Blackbeard himself, perhaps the most infamous of all.
25:22But just like in real life, Blackbeard meets an untimely and grisly end.
25:27He was killed during a surprise attack planned by Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy, who pursued him relentlessly for some time.
25:40Upon his death, Blackbeard had his head cut off and taken as a trophy by Maynard, who planned to use it to claim a bounty.
25:46He's given more of a hero's death in Black Flag, since he's one of Kenway's allies, but it's still relatively true to life.
25:57The King's called for a pardon.
26:00The Ides of March, Assassin's Creed Origins
26:04The people love you, Caesar. You're a god.
26:08The Senate will not bow so easily.
26:10That parliament of clucking heads.
26:13Another high-profile death that aimed to recreate history to the letter came in Assassin's Creed Origins, where Julius Caesar is murdered by his fellow Roman senators for trying to make himself the Emperor of Rome.
26:24Roman Emperors did exist, of course, but not until after Caesar had been gone, which is why the other politicians didn't take kindly to him becoming a dictator.
26:38You've already had plenty of encounters with Caesar by this point, including witnessing his affair with Cleopatra, but it was certainly a dramatic moment to see his demise.
26:46He was brutally stabbed to death by a dozen men in broad daylight, who were supposedly members of the Assassins in-game.
26:54You too, my child.
27:01Storming of the Bastille, Assassin's Creed Unity
27:08Where am I?
27:09In Hell.
27:12The French Revolution officially began on July 14th, 1789, still celebrated as Bastille Day every year in modern France.
27:20The Bastille, a large and oppressive prison in Paris, had stood for hundreds of years, starting life as a fortress.
27:26But while it was capable of repelling British invasions, it eventually fell to the revolutionaries, who stormed the prison and broke the prisoners out.
27:33And one of those prisoners was, of course, Arnold Dorian, soon to be assassin.
27:38What? Prisons scrambled your brains, old man.
27:41Drake took care of that a long time ago.
27:44Arnold didn't really exist, but the Bastille's storming remains one of the most important political moments in French history,
27:50leading to the establishment of the first French Republic and the advent of the revolution.
27:56Goodbye, fist pump!
27:59The Boston Tea Party, Assassin's Creed III
28:02The Sons of Liberty get to send a message to England, and you rob William Johnson of his financing. Your village will be saved.
28:10In 1773, American radicals launched a protest against the British colonial rulers, who had imposed higher taxes on tea that wasn't sold by the East India Company.
28:20Outraged by British taxation, the Sons of Liberty took large amounts of the East India Company's tea and dumped it in the Boston harbor.
28:27We need to keep those bastards at bay while the tea is being dumped.
28:33In Assassin's Creed III, this has the secondary aim of financially damaging the Templars,
28:38which is why it's Connor who has the honor of carrying the tea and tossing it into the ocean.
28:43It's still a huge part of Boston's history and one of the first incidents in the successful American Revolution.
28:48Connor really hit the British where it hurts, right in the tea bags.
28:56Jack the Ripper's Killing Spree, Assassin's Creed Syndicate
29:00Stop!
29:03You want me, Jack?
29:04Come and kill me!
29:08The most notorious serial killer in history, Jack the Ripper was famously never caught or held responsible for his violent crimes.
29:14Syndicate mostly takes place in the 1860s, which left room for an entire DLC set in the unforgiving winter of 1888, when the Ripper was at large.
29:24Evie Frye returns from abroad and is tasked with unmasking the Ripper by Aberline when everybody believes her brother Jacob is responsible.
29:40Of course, you can't set a game in Victorian London without getting Jack the Ripper in there somewhere,
29:45and dedicating a whole expansion gave these ghastly crimes the weight they deserve,
29:49saving them from becoming another of Syndicate's penny-dreadful side missions.
29:55You and your twisted acolytes.
29:58Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed the video, there's more where that came from.