About the author: Iván Goldman is a political scientist from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a Researcher at the Meridiano Foundation and the Argentinean Foreign Policy Research Group (GIPEA) of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires, where he also is a Teaching Assistant at the Argentinean Foreign Policy Seminar.
Niccolò Machiavelli was arguably one of the most important political thinkers of Western history. His work is still debated and relevant centuries after its original appearance. The Florentine thinker, like many other historical figures, managed to make his way into contemporary popular culture, although in a somewhat caricatural fashion. His views on morals and authority have been widely distorted over the years, leading to a biased view of Machiavelli. The word “Machiavellian”[i] is indeed the clearest example of this, though the pejorative term is disputed among historians, philosophers and political scientists.
But this is not the Machiavelli we will be focusing on today.
In this article, I will discuss the virtual Niccolò Machiavelli, the one that aided Ezio Auditore and the Assassins Order in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Specifically, in AC2 and AC Brotherhood, where the two Florentine characters work side by side to fight the Templar conspiracy in Renaissance Italy. Although this is not the only pop-culture reference to Machiavelli – think of TV shows about the Borgias and the Italian Renaissance feature Niccolò Machiavelli as a “famous” character – AC2 and ACB are the most significant portrayals of Machiavelli in videogame medium.
In the following paragraphs, I will try to briefly sum up Machiavelli’s character in the AC franchise, comparing it to its real-life counterpart, trying to understand what Ubisoft got wrong—and what it got right about Machiavellian Political thought. Let’s now step into the Animus, and begin our journey.
Machiavelli’s Role in Assassin’s Creed
When we pounce into the Italian Renaissance in the boots of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, it does not take us long to encounter Machiavelli.
In the AC universe, Niccolò Machiavelli works primarily with the Auditore family as a counsellor, master tactician and intelligence master. As a power in the shadows, Machiavelli helps us power through AC2 and ACB.
In AC2, Machiavelli helps us drive the mercenary Orsi brothers from the allied city of Forlì, as well as removing Girolamo Savonarola—the friar-ruler of Florence that promoted the infamous “bonfires of the vanities” —from power. Machiavelli then helps the Order obtain the Apple of Eden, for the Assassin Order to use in their fight against Borgia’s Papal power and the Templar conspiracy.
In ACB, Machiavelli becomes the leader of the Italian Assassins, after the death of Ezio’s uncle Mario Auditore. In the millennium-old streets of Rome, Machiavelli and Ezio then fight against the power of the corrupt Borgia family, closely tied to the Templar Order.
A couple of hours into this video game, Machiavelli will take a somewhat surprising decision. He renounces his role as leader of the Italian Assassins in favour of Ezio Auditore, awarding to the protagonist the title of “Mentor”. In a gesture of gratitude, Ezio states that Machiavelli will remain his most trusted advisor—a role much closer to what the real-life Niccoló Machiavelli would have probably enjoyed. It is also in this moment when we find out that Machiavelli was our mystery helper when Ezio narrowly escaped death in the past with the help of a then-unknown person.
Even though there was a relationship of mutual respect between Ezio and Machiavelli, not all was smooth sailing between the two Florentine Assassins. From time to time, they quarreled over how the Assassins Order should act. Crucially, when it came to appealing to the people as a basis of support for the Order.
In ACB , Machiavelli rejected the idea of using the people of Rome as a support basis for the Assassins — a position which Ezio defended. Niccolò Machiavelli declared it was a weak foundation from which to build power, using Savonarola’s authoritarian rule in AC2 as an example of how it is hard to find people willing to fight the status-quo. And also, how little opposition the friar found.
Regardless of these practical disagreements between Ezio and Niccolò—or perhaps because of them as they are a sign of sincerity—the leader of the Italian Assassins will continue to see Machiavelli as one of his most trusted advisers.
After one of these disagreements is resolved, we will get the following line of dialogue in a cut scene:
Niccolò: “I intend to write a book about you one day.”
Dialogue between Machiavelli and Ezio in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
Ezio: “If you do, make it short.”
Of course, this was a clever reference from the scriptwriters at Ubisoft, as the book mentioned by Niccolò Machiavelli is none other than The Prince, widely regarded as Machiavelli’s magnum opus and one of the most influential texts in western political thought.
With these details in mind, let’s briefly go through the life of the real Niccolò Machiavelli.
Machiavelli’s Life and Times
Of course, this was a clever reference from the scriptwriters at Ubisoft, as the book mentioned by Niccolò Machiavelli is none other than The Prince, widely regarded as Machiavelli’s magnum opus and one of the most influential texts in western political thought.
With these details in mind, let’s briefly go through the life of the real Niccolò Machiavelli.
Crucially, most of Machiavelli’s works were only published after the author’s death, leaving little room for Machiavelli to answer the criticism directed against him that appeared almost at the same moment his most important works – the aforementioned The Prince and the more extensive Discourses on Livy. This led to a vilification of the Florentine thinker by many authors across several centuries. Yet his legacy as a political thinker lives on.
As far as we know, of course, the real-life Niccolò Machiavelli was neither the leader nor the main councillor of a secret order of Assassins. What we do know, is that his career as a military, political and diplomatic leader and his theorist credentials provide rich material, as well as a fascinating historical character for Ubisoft’s AC franchise.
However, there are a few key points that I believe Ubisoft got wrong about Machiavelli’s political thought either due to a creative decision or as a failure to find a fit for Niccolò Machiavelli’s ideas with the AC2 and ACB game dynamics and storyline. History has not been fair with Machiavelli’s legacy, and his thought has been distorted across time. Almost since their original publication, a sort of anti-Machiavellian mythos has garnered around his works. Sadly, in some aspects it seems like the Assassin’s Creed developers tapped into these misconceptions.
Let us cover some examples.
What Ubisoft Got Wrong About Machiavellian Thought
Leaving aside issues of chronological inaccuracies and creative license, I think the first point of tension between AC Machiavelli and real-life Machiavelli revolves around the issue of mercenaries.
In AC, Machiavelli states that he finds mercenaries not worthy of trust, since their only allegiance is to money. This reflects Machiavellian political thought; regardless, Machiavelli admits he hired mercenaries to help Ezio when he was in trouble in the past. One could argue this only happened in specific instances or that it was a moment of expediency, yet is hard to make such justifications congruent with the narrative after the very same games show us Machiavelli critiquing mercenary armies as he thought that mercenary armies were “notorious for evaporating when things got tough” (Parks, 2009, p. 18). So it is hard to believe Machiavelli would have resorted to mercenaries, especially during a crisis.
The acolytes of the Italian Assassins that join the order during ACB better reflect the ideal of a loyal citizen militia that the real-life Machiavelli stood for—even considering their allegiance in this case is to an order instead of a country. This makes it harder to understand why this contradiction was overlooked in the script by Ubisoft. Was this narrative choice by Ubisoft the result of mission design constraints during development?
Another conflictive point between the “two Machiavellis” is their relationship and views towards the Borgia family. The Borgias are the main antagonist of the AC2 and ACB games; as such, Machiavelli holds a negative view of them and actively tries to fight them and their influence.
In reality, the situation was different. Niccolò had rather ambiguous views of the Borgia: ruthless as they may have been, they were successful leaders from the standpoint of state power.
Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) was highlighted as Machiavelli as the prototype of a leader who had no impediments to reaching its targets—a con man, but a successful one:
“Pope Alexander VI never did anything but con people. That was all he ever thought about. And he always found people he could con. No one ever gave more convincing promises than Alexander, or swore greater oaths to back them up, and no one ever kept his promises less; yet his deceptions always worked, because he knew this side of human nature so well.”
(Machiavelli, 2009, p. 70)
Regarding Cesare, the case becomes even clearer. Machiavelli not only served as a diplomat in Cesare Borgia’s court, but in The Prince, he proposes Borgia as a model ruler.
As Machiavelli himself states in The Prince:
“Having given this summary of everything Cesare Borgia did, I can’t find anything to criticize; on the contrary, and as I said, I mean to propose him as a model for anyone who comes to power through fortunate circumstances or with the help of another ruler’s armed forces. Given his great determination and considerable ambitions, Borgia could hardly have behaved any differently…”
(Machiavelli, 2009, p. 31)
Although the inversion of this relationship is interesting for plot purposes, it stands in clear contradiction with the opinions of the historical figure the Assassin’s Creed franchise tries to reflect in the character of Machiavelli. I argue here that this AC narrative stance misinterprets Machiavelli’s work and ignores part of his biography.
Finally, and I think this is the main problem with Ubisoft’s reflection of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, the “Creed of the Assassins” itself is in contradiction with Machiavellian thought in some of its key points.
In many occurrences across his work, Machiavelli points to the importance of strong authority for those who wish to remain in power.
This is not easily reconciled with the Assassins’ emphasis on the fight for individual freedom and against government authority (particularly, authoritarian ones). The Creed of “nothing is true, everything is permitted” repeated as a mantra by the Assassins as their key guiding principle has a few important implications we should mention.
Let’s begin with the “nothing is true” part. If we are to consider this statement at face value, it would be admitting that the main supports on which societies stand are quite fragile and arbitrary. Machiavelli would likely argue against this — perhaps not denying its philosophical truth, he would probably advise against it in practice, with a view of building strong social foundations. Machiavelli—especially The Prince—can be read as a manual on how to obtain and retain power. Because of this, it is hard to think that the real Machiavelli would support an organization like the Assassins as it finds in one of its guiding principles a statement that goes against what he most tried to create.
As the Florentine thinker himself says:
“…a ruler’s power must be based on solid foundations; otherwise he’s bound to fall. And the main foundations of any state, whether it be new, or old, or a new territory acquired by an old regime, are good laws and good armed forces. And since you can’t have good laws if you don’t have good armed forces, while if you have good armed forces good laws inevitably follow…”
(Machiavelli, 2009, p. 48)
Good laws and good armed forces mean authority, not necessarily the fight against it that the Assassins believe. For Machiavelli, there is no such thing as a moral basis on which to judge the use of power as legitimate or illegitimate. Authority and power are equal, he who has power has the right and the task to command. Yet goodness does not guarantee power, and the ruler cannot assert authority simply on the basis of good behaviour. For Niccolò Machiavelli, authority spurs from the quill and the sword, not from moral rightness (Nederman, 2023).
Moving now to the “everything is permitted” part of The Creed, I detect two main problems. First, this maxim does not apply to the Assassins Order itself as we are not shown a group of ruthless individuals willing to do anything to obtain their objectives, against their fellow Creed members. They do have some—although sometimes vague—moral limitations. The second problem with the “everything is permitted” maxim has more to do with Niccolò Machiavelli’s ideas.
We could jump to the conclusion that this motto reflects Machiavelli’s political theory quoting the apocryphal phrase “the end justifies the means”. Not only this was never said by Niccolò Machiavelli, but it is also a simplification of his thought.
Sentences like “the end justifies the means” or “everything is permitted” imply firstly that we are the main conductors of our actions and our destinies, but also that no moral impediment should stop us from achieving a goal. These indeed sound like amoral statements. Yet calling Machiavelli a harbinger of immorality in politics is a common mistake. His works have far deeper implications and touch on subjects beyond what the eye can see at first sight. As it has been mentioned by works like Rinesi (2003)[ii] on Machiavelli, the Florentine thinker did not propose the end of morals, he proposed a new morality different to the prevailing one in the era of the Renaissance in Italy. He separated political morals from religious morals, a new approach to morality at the time.
The famous “it is better to be feared or to be loved” dichotomy is introduced in Chapter XVII of The Prince. But as Machiavelli suggests, a leader might wish to be both. Yet, it is hard to reconcile these two aims. In such a scenario, it is—according to Machiavelli—safer to be feared than be loved, as fear is harder to break than love. Following this, we can see that it is not that Machiavelli proposes immortality as the way to go because good values such as love are worthless for a leader. He rather posits, after analyzing the political and social reality of his time, that fear is a more useful tool to maintain power for a leader. Which, we should also state, does not necessarily entail being an unbearably cruel leader. Machiavelli stated that it is best to be both feared and loved. But when this is not possible, the best course of action for a political leader is to inspire fear because this is a much more reliable path to survival (Sonnenfeld, 2021).
Summing up, although the real-life Machiavelli could probably talk with the AC Machiavelli, they are not the same and some key differences among them taint the otherwise great job Ubisoft made with the AC2 and ACB games and their portrayal of Renaissance Italy.
Conclusions and Why It Matters
In conclusion, Ubisoft can give AC Machiavelli the liberty of saying he only wrote The Prince after meeting Ezio, and indeed we can see some of the Assassin’s Creed in this timeless classic. It is possible to suspend one’s disbelief regarding some fictional aspects of Machiavelli’s portrayal, but not all of them. Ubisoft failed to address some of the main points of Machiavellian thought correctly.
I believe this is important due to the great cultural impact franchises and companies as big as Assassin’s Creed and Ubisoft have. Failing to correctly address complex political thought — although admittedly difficult — contributes to spreading the distorted notion of historical events and political thought attached to Machiavelli’s legend, at a far remove from reality. This could create misperceptions and lead us to criticize or leave aside historical sources based on these biases planted in us while playing a videogame. And if historical distortions are pervasive and character portrayals one-sided, game narratives end up serving the public a dish of historical propaganda disguised as entertainment.
Portraying historical events and people from the past in a videogame entails great responsibility—and Ubisoft has been taking great steps in this direction as this Play the Past interview explains—as it is simple to reproduce certain notions and ideas that are not properly explained in society-at-large.
Game development, when it comes to historical accuracy, should be allowed to take creative licences. But developers should also be held accountable if they aim for historical accuracy. As Lena Svensson states, AC2 (and I would personally add ACB too) is a good source of historical information, although a somewhat shallow representation of its period (Svensson, 2013, pp. 43-44). Ubisoft has made advancements in this aspect, but Machiavelli seems to have suffered from these distortions and inaccuracies. As players, we should remain wary of the misperceptions and prejudices that a game that aims for a certain amount of historical verisimilitude may end up reproducing.
Machiavelli lived centuries before the very concept of a videogame was ever dreamed up. Yet to a point, his ideas, so influential for Western political theory, have fallen victim to them.
Will Niccolò Machiavelli ever requiescat in pace?
Bibliography
Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.). Machiavellian. Retrieved from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/machiavellian
Machiavelli, N. (2009). The Prince. London: Penguin Random House UK. Retrieved from https://apeiron.iulm.it/retrieve/handle/10808/4129/46589/Machiavelli%2C%20The%20Prince.pdf
Nederman, C. (2023). Niccolò Machiavelli. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/#:~:text=For%20Machiavelli%2C%20there%20is%20no,on%20account%20of%20being%20good.
Parks, T. (2009). Introduction. In N. Machiavelli, The Prince (p. 18). London: Penguin Random House UK. Retrieved from https://apeiron.iulm.it/retrieve/handle/10808/4129/46589/Machiavelli%2C%20The%20Prince.pdf
Sonnenfeld, J. A. (2021). No, Machiavelli Did Not Say It’s Better to Be Feared Than Loved. Yale Insights. Retrieved from https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/no-machiavelli-did-not-say-its-better-to-be-feared-than-loved
Svensson, L. (2013). Semi-fictionalized History as Teaching Aids: Opportunities for learning history in Assassin’s Creed II as a digital game and novel. Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet. Retrieved from https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/handle/2077/34538/gupea_2077_34538_1.pdf;jsessionid=37B4D46288E35A6FFE634CEEC6B38D78?sequence=1
[i] Adjective. “using clever but often dishonest methods that deceive people so that you can win power or control”. (Cambridge Dictionary).
[ii] For an original take on Machiavelli´s ideas and its influence in the current day world, I strongly reccomend Eduardo Rinesi’s work Política y tragedia: Hamlet entre Hobbes y Maquiavelo (Politics and tragedy: Hamlet between Hobbes and Machiavelli).
Photo of Florence is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license
Photo of Uffizi by Deror avi is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli is in the public domain