CCRB RECORD No. 0004
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
Determination: Explicit — Corruption 3
The antagonist is the Borgia papacy, with the real Pope Alexander VI running the Templar Order from the Vatican.
Brotherhood continues directly from Assassin's Creed II and keeps its premise: the Roman Catholic Church under Rodrigo Borgia — the historical Pope Alexander VI — is the Templar Order's seat of power. The game is set in Rome, and the campaign's structure is the systematic dismantling of Borgia authority over the city, tower by tower, with the Vatican as the centre of the enemy's power. Cesare Borgia, the Pope's son and captain-general of the papal armies, is the primary antagonist; the papacy itself ends in poisoning and betrayal from within. A real pope, named and depicted, running a conspiracy out of the Holy See is the plainest reading of the Corruption category there is.