Board Thread:Series general discussion/@comment-2112031-20170630111652/@comment-18014300-20170630120739
I wanted to point out that I strongly believe that it's a reasonable deduction that in the Mediterranean Defense minigame of Revelations, each city represents the capital of a regional branch. That seems to be exactly what each city is organization-wise, a distinct branch, distinct from one another. Since branches in this era were guilds, it would then follow that each city represents the capital of a guild, which in turn build Dens (aka bureaus), the bases within those cities. Even though Ezio specifically sends Assassins from the Ottoman Brotherhood to populate these guilds, that doesn't invalidate that they're guilds in their own right because membership between guilds is permeable and because as we see with examples like Achilles, Assassins are transferred from one guild to another or to a new region to establish or expand a different guild all the time.
Now, as we see in Mediterranean Defense, each of these cities are also contested by the local Templars. I think that since these cities represent where Assassin branches are located or established, and the Templar in the contest parallel them, then it's reasonable to deduce that the opponents of these Assassin guilds are also regional Templar branches. And as we know, regional Templar branches are called rites.