Crows
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The Crows was a secret organization founded by the Templar Cesare Borgia to eradicate the Assassins through the replication of their own techniques. As a unit of counter-Assassin specialists, they were experts in the arts of stealth, disguise, and murder, and these skills were employed not only in the hunt for Assassins, but against all other enemies of Cesare. At their peak, they terrorized the common people throughout Tuscany.
True to their name, they heavily employed the motif of the crow, and their leader, Sirus Favero was known as the Master of the Crows or Il Corvo. They shared in the Borgia's reputation for viciousness, but over time as they accumulated power, they diverged further and further from their parent organization. By the time that the Assassins began conducting operations against them, they had been classified a rogue organization by the Templars. In their final year, they launched an ambitious campaign to destroy both the Borgia and the Assassins, one that spelled their abrupt demise.
History
Origins
Around 1499, Cesare Borgia began scheming of a way to establish a unit of Templars dedicated to combating the Italian Assassins. He conceived that they would adopt the very skills and tactics that made the Assassins so deadly. To that end, he send a group of orphans to the Vallombrosa Abbey and tricked veteran Spanish Assassin Raphael Sánchez into training them as Assassins for at least five years. Once he had determined that their training was complete, he appointed his ally Sirus Favero as the leader of the fledgling group, which he called "the Crows".
It would be Sirus that presided over their indoctrination into Templar doctrine. By treating every Crow as his son, and the organization a family, he managed to cultivate their steadfast loyalty.
Erstwhile in 1500, shortly after his conquest of the Assassin city Monteriggioni, Cesare sent one of his agents, Pietro de Galencia there to steal the Hidden Blade's blueprints hidden beneath Villa Auditore. Cesare planned to copy the weapon's design and mass-produce it for the Crows. The theft took a few years to conduct, as Pietro had to assimilate himself with the city to learn its secrets. He was ultimately successful in his mission, though he was killed by an Assassin before he could escape to safety.
Cesare then gave the blueprints to a weaponsmith named Demetrio and forced him to invent an upgraded version of the Hidden Blade, the "Corvix Blade". When Demetrio refused to continue building them, Cesare cut his tongue out as punishment and tortured him for days.
Fighting the Assassins
By 1506, the Crows had managed to become an infamous mercenary group, characterized as agile and as masters of small arms. They were known for wearing dark talon-coated cloaks and were pictured with crow themed hoods.
Around that time, the Crows tried to kidnap an ally of the Italian Assassins, Leonardo da Vinci, but they were stopped by the same Assassin from Monteriggioni, known as Lo Sparviero. After their failure, Demetrio sent a letter calling for help to a member of the Assassins, Niccolò Machiavelli and told them that he was plotting to kill Cesare, however, Cesare realized of this and arranged his execution, but was saved by Lo Sparviero before he could be executed.
Some time later, the Crows had took over the Colosseum, where they were receiving the last shipment of Corvix Blades. However, the Assassins realized of this and sent Lo Sparviero to discover what they were up to. Matteo Favero, Sirus' son and a Master Crow, was killed at the top of the Colosseum by the Assassin and the Crows were forced to move out when more Assassins invaded the camp. There, the Assassins captured Sirus, who claimed to be only a merchant forced to work with the Crows and that he hated Cesare, thus joining Machiavelli as an ally.
Reference
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