Templar Rite

Manuel: "I should have been Constantine's successor. I had so many plans."

Ezio: "Your dream dies with you, Manuel. Your empire is gone."

Manuel: "Ah, but I am not the only one with this vision, Assassin. The dream of our Order is universal. Ottoman, Byzantine... these are only labels. Costumes and facades. Beneath these trappings, all Templars are part of the same family."

—Manuel Palaiologos talking to Ezio Auditore about the universality of Templars, 1512.

A Templar Rite, otherwise known as a Rite of the Templar Order and collectively known as the Outer Temple of the Templar Order, is a regional, usually country-specific branch of the Templars and collectively a separate governing structure from the Inner Sanctum, the Outer Temple has no given access to the entire plan of the Order. As the Order spread across the globe, Rites were established in virtually every country. All Rites are led by a single Grand Master or, in the absence of one, a Master Templar.

The regional administration of a Rite mirrors that of its counterpart in the Assassin Order, with Rite leaders being the supreme authority of the branch and overseeing all of the Rite's activities from a main headquarters, while their subodrinates typically operate in an assigned district or administritative division. These subodrinates are directly answerable to the Rite's leader and oversee the Templar facilities in their assigned district to ensure the Order can efficiently maintain control over the local population. Over the centuries, these facilities have varied from towers, dens taken from the Assassins, gang headquarters, and even public and military offices.

Since at least the 17th century, following the creation of the Inner Sanctum and the Council of Elders, the entire collective of Rites became the Outer Temple and were not given access to the complete plans of the Templar Order going forward. With the creation of the Black Cross, their service in the Outer Temple shifted to combating corruption and searching for Pieces of Eden while securing the Inner Sanctum's plans and maintaining the Order's integrity by enforcing the Templar principles within the various Rites' governing structures.

Structure

Authority

Main article: Grand Master of the Templar Order

Main article: Master Templar

Rodrigo: "Enough with your inane prattle! The choice of Doge was never up to any of you, and you were never given permission to make plans."

Marco: "Forgive us, Maestro. We wish only to serve."

—Rodrigo Borgia and Marco Barbarigo, on the plans of the Roman Rite, 1485.

A Grand Master controls a specific geographic region and their Rite is named after it. Under their leadership was the ability to appoint a Lieutenant as their second-in-command, as well as promote any Templar serving under them through the Order's ranks, up to and including the position of Master Templar. In the absence of a Grand Master, a Master Templar holds the authority to oversee a Rite as its de facto leader on behalf of another Rite's Grand Master.

Despite holding the highest attainable rank within their Rite, a Grand Master is not all-powerful and is dependent on the support of their fellow Templars and other Rites around the world. Nevertheless, their duties are essential to the proper functioning of the Templar Order as a whole, so Grand Masters may elect to have bodyguards to protect them at all times, as were the cases with Frederick Weatherall for the de la Serre family, and El Tiburón for Laureano de Torres y Ayala. With the Grand Master themselves being the ruling authority for their own Rite's plans, all members required their superior's approval to enact any changes.

Local

Gist: "The Grand Master is pleased, Shay. What you did in New York... Well, it's only a matter of time now before order is restored."

Shay: "New York was never "orderly", Gist... With Hope gone, perhaps..."

—Gist and Shay discussing the collapse of the Assassin gangs, 1759.

A Borgia Tower in the Campagna district

During the Renaissance, the local influence of the Roman Rite in the Italian city-states were mainly through the Houses of Nobility, such as House of Pazzi in Florence and House of Barbarigo in Venice, the latter House being charge of Venice's San Polo district, and later ruling with a Doge of Venice with access to the Arsenal and had several Templar lairs in landmarks across Italy. The House of Borgia, in the city of Rome, having taken control of the Vatican Papal State, the Roman Rite established Borgia towers that were fortified Guard towers and overseen by a Borgia captain, who effectively ruled over the surrounding district.

In the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantine Templars that returned to Constantinople fought the Ottoman Assassins for control of the latter's dens and, by the 1510s, managed to capture most of them, allowing them to rule over the districts each den was situated in.

Shay managing his fleet

During the Seven Years' War, the Colonial Assassins had established gang headquarters that were also bureaus, these had an Assassin gang leader that was a bureau leader, in charge of their own district. Once these were taken over by the Colonial Rite, they became the local headquarters of the Colonial Rite and the British Empire and were managed by the Assassin-turned-Templar, Shay Cormac, using taxes to renovate neglected infrastructure. And began taking over forts from the French Empire in the River Valley and the Atlantic Ocean to secure border control of their region, fair trade for local farmers to prosper. Additionally, Shay also created a fleet under his command and served as its treasurer, while also using his Templar flagship, the Morrigan, to maintain local control of the areas at sea. In all these local areas across the region, Shay also intercepted assassinations by the Colonial Assassins

During the American Revolution, the Colonial Rite had reorganised the local management of the region on land and sea that was established by Master Templar Shay Cormac. In Boston and New York City, the local districts were reorganised to three districts, thereby also centralising and relocating the former six headquarters taken over in New York by Shay while handing over the leadership to six local Templars combined, with three in each separate city, leading a district of their own. And local control of the coastal areas was handed to the Templar Nicholas Biddle, their Captain of the Continental Navy, using his flagship, the USS Randolph.

Templar gang leader, Rexford Kaylock, atop his train.

During the mid-19th century in London during the Industrial Revolution, the British Rite had established gang headquarters in all seven of London's major boroughs, each lead by a Templar gang leader. From their gang, the Blighters, were used to protect the Templar industries such as Starrick Industries and its subsidiaries to other corporations it collaborated with and engaged in gang wars to maintain their local control and by 1868 had managed to reduce their gang opposition to a handful of Clinkers remain in Whitechapel.

History

"We need to redouble our efforts and expand our order, and establish a permanent base here. Although the site eludes us, I am confident we will find it."

―Haytham Kenway discussing the establishemnt of a permanent Templar presence in the Thirteen Colonies, 1755.

Alfred the Great laying the foundations of the Templar Order

The establishment of a Templar Rite varies from region to region. The oldest organized Templar branch is the British Rite, which was founded around 878 CE by King Alfred of Wessex following the destruction of the Order of the Ancients. Seeking to reform the Order into an organization that more closely followed his Christian beliefs, Alfred slowly built it up over the next several years by recruiting members from all walks of life and of all religions, who were united by a common desire to seek the betterment of humanity through the establishment of a New World Order.

While Alfred's new Order adopted the name of the Templars by the late 10th century and spread its influence across Europe, it is unknown at which exact moment in time the individual Rites began to take shape. During the public era of the organization between the 12th and 14th centuries, the Templars took advantage of the Crusades to spread their reach to Asia, beginning with the Levant, where the Levantine Rite was established by the late 12th century.

Grand Master Robert de Sablé leading the Knights Templar

Posing as a knightly order with headquarters in both Jerusalem and on Cyprus, the Levantine Rite secretly comprised both Crusaders and Saracens and was led by a Grand Master, whose primary goal was acquiring an Apple of Eden that would allow the Templars to realize their vision of a New World Order by brainwashing all of humanity. However, their efforts were opposed by the Levantine Assassins, eventually resulting in the Order losing their influence in the Levant by the early 13th century.

In 1241, the Mongolian Rite was established by Möngke Khan, future ruler of the Mongol Empire, after he learned about and came to embrace the Templar ideals thanks to a knight captured during the Battle of Legnica. After Möngke became Great Khan of the Mongol Empire a decade later, he began recruiting members of the imperial guard, the Kheshigs, into the Mongolian Rite.

When the Templars were driven underground following their public persecution in the early 14th century, Rites became the main organizatory form of the Order as it continued to conduct its operations in secret. The Renaissance period saw the rise of numerous country-specific Rites, most prominently the Roman Rite in Italy led by the House of Borgia, and the Byzantine Rite in the Byzantine and later the Ottoman Empire. However, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Roman Rite became corrupted by the actions of two of its Grand Masters, Rodrigo Borgia and his son Cesare, who were more interested in accumlating power than furthering the Templar cause; this caused future generations of Templars to look down on the Borgia's rule over the Roman Rite, regarding it as the "Dark Age of the Order". During the liberation of Rome by the Italian Assassins in the early 1500s, Ezio Auditore destroyed all twelve Borgia towers scattered around Rome and assassinated its captains, severely weakening the Templars' control over the city.

Derinkuyu, the hideout of the Byzantine Templars

Meanwhile, the Byzantine Rite was met with a streak of defeats, beginning with the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, which forced the Templars to abandon the city and establish a secret base of operations in Derinkuyu, Cappadocia. Following the Roman Rite's defeat by the Italian Assassins in the early 16th century, the Byzantine Templars became the foremost Rite in Europe and plotted to restore their former power, but faced opposition from both the Ottoman Assassins and Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the Mentor of the Italian Brotherhood, culminating in the Byzantine Rite's destruction by 1512 and Ezio helped the Ottoman Assassins reclaim all of their lost dens, effectively forcing the Byzantine Templars out of the city once more.

In the mid-16th century, a number of European Templars, including Francis Xavier, Alessandro Valignano, Gaspar Vilela and others, took an interest in the largely unexplored regions of the world, primarily Japan. Posing as Jesuit missionaries, these Templars cultivated alliances with the local warlords and clans and used them to spread the Templar ideology in the country, laying the foundations of the Japanese Rite.

Laureano Torres with his fellow Caribbean Templars

In the late 17th century, the West Indies Rite was established by Laureano de Torres y Ayala, a Spanish Templar and Governor of Cuba, who had been tasked by the Council of Elders to locate the Observatory, an Isu surveillance facility hidden in the Caribbean. Over the course of nearly five decades, Torres recruited numerous allies to help him in his search, as well as restore order to the Caribbean amidst the Golden Age of Piracy. However, their efforts were undone in the early 18th century by the West Indies Assassins, in particular Edward Kenway, who eliminated most of the West Indies Rite's high-ranking members, leading to the branch's collapse by 1722.

The mid-18th century saw the formation of two new Templar Rites: the Louisiana Rite and the Colonial Rite. The former was established in the 1750s by Madeleine de L'Isle at the behest of the Parisian Rite, and was the main Templar branch operating in southern North America, primarily in New Orleans and Chichen Itza, where Madeleine had set up an excavation to locate an Isu artifact known as the Prophecy Disk. However, this Rite would be completely dismantled by 1777 through the actions of the Louisianan Assassin Aveline de Grandpré, Madeleine's stepdaughter.

Lawrence Washington meeting with his associates at Mount Vernon

Meanwhile, the Colonial Rite was established over the course of multiple years, beginning in 1738, when Lawrence Washington was sent to the Thirteen Colonies by Reginald Birch, Grand Master of the British Rite, to locate the fabled Grand Temple. By the 1750s, Washington had recruited numerous allies, many of whom were inducted into the Templar Order, including Christopher Gist, William Johnson, Samuel Smith and James Wardrop, and laid the foundations of a Templar network in the New World, though he came no closer to his main objective of finding the Grand Temple.

Following Washington's assassination by the Colonial Assassins in 1752, Wardrop replaced him as de facto leader of the Templars in the Thirteen Colonies while Birch assigned the task of the Grand Temple's discovery to Haytham Kenway. Arriving in the colonies in 1754, Haytham continued Washington and Wardrop's work and officially founded the Colonial Rite as its first Grand Master, leading it for almost three decades, until his death in 1781 at the hands of his Assassin son, Ratonhnhaké:ton. Shortly after Haytham's death, the Colonial Rite collapsed due to Ratonhnhaké:ton's actions, though it would reform itself several years later as the American Rite, continuing to operate in the newly-established United States.

Known Rites

• Algerian Rite
• American Rite (formerly known as the Colonial Rite)
• Austrian Rite
• British Rite
• Canadian Rite
• Chinese Rite (also known as the Shanghai Rite)
• Egyptian Rite
• German Rite
• Greek Rite
• Japanese Rite
• Levantine Rite (also known as the Knights Templar)
• Libyian Rite
• Mexican Rite
• Mongolian Rite
• Parisian Rite
• Portuguese Rite
• Roman Rite
• Russian Rite
• Spanish Rite
• Swedish Rite
• Tunisian Rite
• West Indies Rite (also known as the Caribbean Rite)

Former Rites

• Byzantine Rite
• Louisiana Rite (also known as the Templar Order of New Orleans)

Trivia

• Although the Templars' predecessors, the Order of the Ancients, also maintained multiple regional branches, it is unknown if these branches were called Rites or if another term was used.