AC3: American Revolution Question: was Charles Lee actually a tyrannical servant of the English Aristocracy? Also: did the game do an adequate job at depicting a Mohawk village?

From what I recall of playing Assassin's Creed III, Kanatahséton isn't a great example of a typical Mohawk village at the time. For plot reasons, the village is culturally conservative and isolated not only from colonial life but also from other Mohawk communities. Until the Templars show up and wreck the place, there's little evidence that European colonists are anywhere around, despite being in the Mohawk Valley. Historically speaking, prior to the French-and-Indian War, most of the Mohawk had resettled to the north, either in what's now Canada or close to it. Kanatahséton has its reason for staying in the Mohawk Valley, but that would also mean its rather exposed to incoming Dutch and German settlers who had been occupying the valley under British protection. In a normal Mohawk village, you'd expect to see signs of trade with the colonists - trade cloth, firearms, metal pots and pans, were all popular items by this time. None of which appears in Kanatahséton from what I remember.

The demographics of Kanatahséton are also a bit odd. A typical Mohawk village would normally have between 1000 - 2000 people living in it (once the population reached 2000, plans would be made to split the village in two in new locations. Kanatahséton is tiny in comparison, with maybe two dozen people at best. That small population is also peculiar because it has three longhouses, each of which could be home to up to fifty people. A lot of beds are empty in Kanatahséton. EDIT: Almost forgot to mention that the village also appears to be lacking an appropriate amount of farmland around it. If I remember correctly, outside the walls of the village was just a forest clearing and a lake. There should have been many acres of corn, beans, and squash being planted.

Because Kanatahséton seems to stand apart from the rest of the Mohawk nation and the Haudenosaunee at large, we miss out of a lot of Revolutionary politics and relevant historical figures - the absence of which are some of my main disappoints with the game. I would have loved to see the inclusion of Joseph Brant (famed Mohawk Loyalist and brother-in-law of William Johnson, one of the Templars in the game), who would have been an interesting foil to Connor. In the game, Charles Lee tricks Kanen'tó:kon (Connor's childhood friend) and the other men of Kanatahséton into joining up with the British. In history, the Mohawk in general came to side with the British (with Joseph Brant being an early and vocal proponent of such an alliance). Connor would be the outlier among his people. The Oneida and the Tuscarora favored the side of the colonists and the rift ultimately caused a Haudenosaunee civil war during the Revolution. Considering Connor's feelings toward his chosen side by the war's end, it would have been cool to get a follow-up DLC set during Northwest Indian War (1790s) where Connor teams up with Little Turtle and Blue Jacket (and Brant, indirectly) to defend the Western Confederacy (the super-Confederacy of Native nations in the Ohio country founded right after the Revolution). He would have got to meet 27-year-old Tecumseh too.

AC2: Italian Renaissance Question: was the Borgia family as influential as they are depicted in the games? Did they have ties to the papacy? Were they bloodthirsty?

The role of the Borgia family is interesting. Coming from Valencian nobility in Aragon, they were a very influential clan in that era. Notably, two of them ended up pope: Alfons Borgia (Pope Callixtus III) 1455-1458, and Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) 1492-1503. The latter sired Cesare Borgia, a fairly well-known condottieri and former Cardinal, a key character in Machiavelli's The Prince.

Due to their Valencian origins, they had strong influence in the rise of Castille&Leon and Aragon to dominate the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere. During Alexander VI's reign as pope, papal bulls were published that had strong influence on African slavery and the division of the world between Spain and Portugal. However, he is also widely considered the worst pope ever, although recent scholarship tends to view him as not being much more corrupt than other popes of that period.

You have to keep in mind that Julius II the great Renaissance pope was an enemy of the Borgias, so there was/is no shortage of negative opinion against them.

Were they bloodthirsty?

This came mostly from the belief that the death of Giovanni Borgia, oldest son of Rodrigo, was ordered by one of his own immediate family members. As far as I can tell there many theories, but there is no one definitive theory.

In respect to Assassins Creed Unity, no Napoleon was not that involved in the Early Revolution. In fact the time in which the game is set, he is at the Siege of Toulon.

The real connection of Napoleon to the Revolution at the time was his connection to Augustin Robespierre, the brother of the infamous Maxmilian. He caught the eye of Augustin with a pamphlet that argued in favor of the Jacobin controlled government, the famous Supper at the Bouccare. However he would be thrown in,jail for his association with the Jacobins after the Thermidorian Reaction. He wouldn't become noticable until 1796 when he helps protect the Directorate from an overthrow.

AC4: Pirates of the Caribbean Questions: Did James Kidd galavant as a man in the world of Piracy, was James Kidd a women?

The 'James Kidd' you're referring to was Mary Read, an infamous and historical pirate who 'posed' as a man intermittently throughout her life. As a child her family presented her as a male to continue receiving a pension once her elder brother had died and when she grew older she actually joined ranks of the British and the Dutch and fought in various battles where she was supposedly known for her courage in combat.

Later in life she was on what I believe to be a freight voyage to the Phillipines Carribean when the vessel was captured by the legendary 'Calico' Jack, a pirate of some reknown even today, who was married to Anne Bonny, an 'openly' female pirate who, in my opinion, is of even more interest than Read herself. The three had some mild success in pirating but were arrested, tried, and sentenced within months of Read joining the crew. 'Calico' was immediately executed while Bonny and Read plead pregnancy (which may or may not have been true) and were imprisoned. Read died a few months after from 'fever', though that designation could be such a wide variety of actual illnesses that speculation is all we're left with on that point. As regards Bonny, we actually have no idea what happened to her beyond speculation as we have no death certificate for her as we do for Mary Read.

I would like to point out that Mary Read's pirating 'career' was much more brief than one might expect. In fact, to the best of our knowledge she was only actually a pirate for less than six months before the trio were arrested.

I haven't found any historical references for the use of the name 'James Kidd' and must assume that the game designers invented the alias as a nod to continuity with 'Captain Kidd', perhaps suggesting that Read was secretly Kidd himself. The only actual alias we can be sure that she used in her life was "Mark", probably derived from her youthful performances of being her deceased brother of the same name.

In regards to sources for this information, I will say that I derived the majority of my information from: Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives by the esteemed maritime/naval scholar David Cordingly.

I will make note here, however, of a certain popular source that cannot be relied upon for strict historical fact. I speak of Charles Johnson's A General History of Pyrates. While it is certainly a riveting read and filled with the kind of pirate-stories that delight our childhood, it is also largely a collection of anecdotal evidence filtered through a sensationalist perspective, more akin to a penny dreadful written by a local history buff than a legitimate historical source.