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The Americas, formerly known popularly as the New World, is a continent that comprises almost the entirety of the land of the Western Hemisphere of Earth. The giant landmass is traditionally divided into two constituents, North America and South America, both of which more commonly receive the appellation of continent instead. To its west is the vast Pacific Ocean and to the east, the Atlantic Ocean that serves as its divide from the Eastern Hemisphere.

Though it was home to several powerful civilizations such as the Maya, the Inca, and the Aztecs, for the great majority of human history, it was unknown to virtually everyone in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Atlantic Ocean served as a natural barrier that segregated the peoples of the two landmasses, and only select members of the Assassin Brotherhood were aware of its existence.

This changed in 1492 when the voyage of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, guided by the maps of Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis publicly exposed the existence of the continent to the majority of Europeans for the first time. A flurry of colonialism by European powers followed, and nations such as England, Spain, and France rushed to claim territory in the landmass in a contest for resources. With little respect to the rights of technologically inferior peoples which preceded them, entire populations of indigenous Americans were wiped out in the ensuing centuries of conquest.

In the meantime, the Assassins and the Templars extended their operations to the continent as well, establishing new guilds and rites as their millennia-long conflict continued to rage on. In the modern times, the Americas is host to many prominent nations that are the legacy of European colonialism, including Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, and the superpower of the United States of America.

History

Isu era

Under the Isu, the Americas was the site of many of their Temples, most notably the Grand Temple near modern-day Turin, New York that served as the central facility where the Capitoline Triad worked to devise solutions to save themselves from the impending solar cataclysm. Other complexes included the Observatory, a surveillance center in Hispaniola; a vault under what would later become Chichen Itza that held the Prophecy Disks; and a series of infrastructure that stabilized the planet's crust.

After the Isu civilization collapsed in 75,000 BCE by their failure to prevent the cataclysm and the revolution of humans, the surviving humans proliferated freely, no longer under the dominion of their creators. For the following millennia, human civilization across the world progressed gradually.

The human societies of the Americas, separated from those on other continents by the oceans, developed independently and without contact with peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Such was the segregation that by the time of the Third Crusade in the 12th century, the Levantine Assassin was mystified to gaze upon Americas from a globe holographically projected by an Apple of Eden.

At that point, he was one of the few humans in the Eastern Hemisphere to learn of the Americas' existence, but the the continent did not elude the attention of the Templars. In 1398, the Templar knight James Gunn partook in an expedition by the Norwegian nobleman Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney that explored the coast of North America, likely reaching Nova Scotia and what is now Massachusetts.

Race to the Americas

In the 15th century, the Americas became known to the Ottoman geographer and later Assassin Piri Reis, who decided to include it in a series of maps he drew. By 1491, these maps had fallen into the hands of the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus. Compiling an atlas from Piri Reis's maps and those drawn by other cartographers, Columbus became determined to chart a western, seaward route to Asia. By this point, the Templars had become privy to the secrets of the atlas. Realizing that there was an entire continent virtually empty of major world powers, they became desperate to explore it first. Establishing their influence in this land before the European nations or their mortal enemies, the Assassins, could prove pivotal in their quest to inaugurate a New World Order.

Needing time to prepare their own expedition across the Atlantic, the Templars sought to cut short the voyage planned by Columbus, anxious that he would publicize the Americas to all of Europe. When they failed to murder him in Venice thanks to the timely intervention of the Italian Assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze, however, they resorted to a more convoluted plan: to exhaust the treasury of Crown of Castile—the only venue left for Columbus—by keeping it embroiled in the Granada War as long as possible. This scheme failed dramatically when Ezio alongside Spanish Assassins Raphael Sánchez and Luis de Santángel helped put an end to the war.

Dawn of European Imperialism

Columbus's voyage proceeded at last in 1492, and all of the Templars' fears materialized, with Columbus's "discovery" of the continent spreading rapidly throughout all of Europe in a flurry of excitement. What followed were a series of further expeditions by Spain as they rushed to claim the "New World" for themselves.

Under conquistador Hernán Cortés, the Spaniards encountered the Aztecs for the first time in 1519. The invasion that followed led to the annexation of the Aztec Empire by Spain, and about a decade later the Inca also fell to Spanish conquest.

West Indies

European colonization of the Americas progressed dramatically in the succeeding centuries, always at the expense of the indigenous populations. As the more readily accessible region, the Caribbean, better known then as the West Indies, was among the first to be widely colonized, with islands throughout its archipelago being seized by competing European powers. As a consequence, the Taíno were virtually extinct by the beginning of the 18th century. Prominent settlements in this area included the Spanish city of Havana in Hispaniola, the British city of Kingston in Jamaica, and the French city of Port-au-Prince in Saint-Domingue.

Owing to the lesser political control in these colonies, the West Indies became a hotbed for piracy, particularly in the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession whose end left many privateers without a livelihood. At its peak, the Golden Age of Piracy, as it became known, saw a pirate proto-state dubbed the "Pirate Republic" on Nassau before the British finally cracked down on it in 1718.

North America

The Dutch, British, and French had all trailed after the Spanish. Each of them set their sights on the closer lands along the northeastern coast of North America.

The British's first attempt at a permanent settlement in 1585 failed when the Roanoke Colony mysteriously vanished by the time it was revisited in 1590. They had better success in

Dutch West India Company founded the settlement of Albany in 1617 and New Amsterdam in 1624, the British first attempt at a per