Templar Rite
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 Temple, consisting of the Inner Sanctum, the Council of Elders, the Guardians and the General of the Cross. 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.[1]
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 subordinates typically operate in an assigned district or administrative division. These subordinates 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.[1] 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[2] by enforcing the Templar principles within the various Rites' governing structures.[1]
Structure[edit | edit source]
Authority[edit | edit source]
- Main article: Grand Master of the Templar Order
- Main article: Master Templar
A Grand Master controls a specific geographic region and their Rite is named after it.[1] They have the authority to promote any Templar serving under them through the Order's ranks, up to and including the position of Master Templar.[2] 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.[1]
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,[3] and El Tiburón for Laureano de Torres y Ayala.[4] 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.[5][6][7]
Districts[edit | edit source]
- 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.[src]
During the Renaissance, the local influence of the Roman Rite in the Italian city-states was mainly through noble families such as the House of Pazzi in Florence and the House of Barbarigo in Venice, the latter house being in charge of Venice's San Polo and Arsenal districts and eventually installing one of their own, Marco Barbarigo, as Doge of Venice. The Rite also maintained secret Templar lairs in several cities where they housed their wealth.[8]
The House of Borgia, the most influential of the Templar-affiliated noble houses, was primarily based in the city of Rome. Following Rodrigo Borgia's election as Pope, the house gained control of the Vatican and, indirectly, the Papal States. In time, they established Borgia towers in every distrct of Rome, which were fortified guard towers overseen by a Borgia captain who effectively ruled over the surrounding district. Within Rome, there were also lairs used by the Templar-allied Followers of Romulus,[9] a Crow headquarters with their own Borgia captain,[10] several operating Templar agents,[9][11] and areas where various war machines were developed.[9]
In the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantine Templars that returned to Constantinople fought the Ottoman Assassins for control of the latter's dens and, by 1511, managed to capture most of them, allowing them to rule over the districts each den was situated in.[12] The Templars controlled all business in the districts they dominated, closing down shops that refused to submit to their rule, while their troops patrolled the streets.[13]
During the Seven Years' War, the Colonial Assassins had established gang headquarters that also functioned as bureaus. Once these were taken over by the Colonial Rite, they became the local headquarters of the Colonial Templars and were managed by the Assassin-turned-Templar, Shay Cormac, using taxes to renovate neglected infrastructure.[14]
The Colonial Rite also supported the British Empire by taking over forts from the French Empire in the River Valley[15] and the Atlantic Ocean[16] to secure border control of the region[15][17] and fair trade for local farmers. Additionally, Shay created a fleet under his command and served as its treasurer,[15] while also using his flagship, the Morrigan, to maintain control of various areas at sea.[18][19] In all these areas across the region, Shay also intercepted assassinations by the Colonial Brotherhood.[16]
By the time of the American Revolutionary War, the Colonial Rite had reorganised the local management of the regions they controlled. In the case of Boston and New York, both cities were divided into three districts, each one overseen by a local Templar leader, thereby abandoning the six New York headquarters that had been used during the Seven Years' War.[20][21] Fort Arsenal, Shay's personal home and base of operations, was also nowhere to be found, having been presumably destroyed during the Great Fire of New York and replaced by Fort Washington.[22]
Local control of the coastal areas was handed to the Templar Nicholas Biddle, a captain in the Continental Navy, using his flagship, the USS Randolph.[23] Other Templar agents were also assigned to various campaigns across the colonies,[24] including the Louisiana Templar, Officer Davidson, who was sent to assist operations in New York.[25]
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During the mid-19th century in London, the British Rite had established gang headquarters in all seven of the city's major boroughs, each led by a Templar gang leader personally handpicked by Grand Master Crawford Starrick. The gang, known as the Blighters, was used to protect Templar businesses such as Starrick Industries and its subsidiary corporations,[26] and engaged in gang wars to maintain control of the underworld, eliminating all rival syndicates.[27]
Establishment[edit | edit source]
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.[28]
While Alfred's new Order adopted the name of the Templars by the late 10th century and spread its influence across Europe,[29] 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.[30]
Posing as a knightly order with headquarters in both the city of Jerusalem[30] and on the island of Cyprus,[31] 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,[30] eventually resulting in the Order losing their influence in the Levant by the early 13th century.[13]
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 Kheshig, into the Mongolian Rite.[32]
When the Templars were driven underground following their public persecution in the early 14th century,[33] Rites became the main organizational 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,[8] and the Byzantine Rite in the Byzantine and later the Ottoman Empire.[13] 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 accumulating 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".[34]
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.[13]
In the mid-16th century, a number of European Templars, including Francis Xavier, Alessandro Valignano, and Gaspar Vilela, 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.[35]
Another Templar, the Portuguese merchant Nuno Caro, was ordered by the Inner Sanctum of the Templar Order to scour Japan for Pieces of Eden, but chose to focus on building up Templar influence in the country, primarily through trade and his alliance with the secret cabal known as the Shinbakufu.[36] By 1582, Caro had become the de facto Templar leader in Japan, but following his death at the hands of the samurai Yasuke, the Japanese Rite began to decline.[37] In response, the Inner Sanctum authorized the Black Cross to continue the Order's work in Japan.[38] By the 19th century, the Japanese Templars had successfully managed to rebuild their strength after being forced to keep a low profile under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate.[39]
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 to locate the Observatory, an Isu surveillance facility hidden in the Caribbean.[7] Over the course of nearly 50 years, 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 members,[40] leading to the branch's collapse by 1722.[41]
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,[42] 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 site 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.[43]
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.[44] 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.[45]
Following Washington's assassination by the Colonial Assassins in 1752, Wardrop replaced him as de facto leader of the Templars in the Thirteen Colonies[46] while Birch assigned the task of the Grand Temple's discovery to Haytham Kenway.[47] Arriving in the colonies in 1754, Haytham continued Washington and Wardrop's work and officially founded the Colonial Rite as its first Grand Master,[22] leading it for almost three decades, until his death in 1781 at the hands of his Assassin son, Ratonhnhaké:ton.[48] Shortly after Haytham's death, the Colonial Rite collapsed due to Ratonhnhaké:ton's actions,[22] though it would reform itself several years later as the American Rite, continuing to operate in the newly-established United States.[3]
Known Rites[edit | edit source]
- Algerian Rite[49]
- American Rite (formerly known as the Colonial Rite)[22]
- Austrian Rite[50]
- British Rite[22]
- Canadian Rite[51]
- Chinese Rite (also known as the Shanghai Rite)[52][2]
- Egyptian Rite[53]
- German Rite[54]
- Greek Rite[49]
- Japanese Rite[35]
- Libyian Rite[49]
- Mexican Rite[55]
- Parisian Rite[56]
- Portuguese Rite[49]
- Roman Rite[8]
- Russian Rite[57]
- Spanish Rite[58]
- Swedish Rite[59]
- Tunisian Rite[49]
- West Indies Rite (also known as the Caribbean Rite)[40]
Former Rites[edit | edit source]
- Byzantine Rite[13]
- Levantine Rite (also known as the Knights Templar)[30]
- Louisiana Rite (also known as the Templar Order of New Orleans)[43]
- Mongolian Rite[32]
Behind the scenes[edit | edit source]
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.
References[edit | edit source]
