Is there some way to vassalize the pope? I need his land to unite Italia, but this guy has practically infinite money and can thus pull infinite soldiers out of his rear end. I can beat them off, but it's impossible to leave a small siege force somewhere, because he will come up with a 6000 man stack and destroy them. Papal Guards is a vassal of the Papacy whenever the Pope is landed. It can be retracted after vassalizing the papacy, usually by pressing an antipope 's claim. The Pope must remain landed. Mamluks is a vassal of Egypt from 850. Its really not that much to deal with. You click a button to turn one of your bishops into an antipope. He gets an immediate strong claim on the papacy. You declare a war that you can pretty much instantly win because the pope has no allies and barely any levies. Your antipope becomes the official pope and stays your vassal as long as you're an.

You need a title that is the liege/overlord of the title you fought for them. I.e you got a person a county, but you need a duchy title that has the county inside to be able to vassalize them. Boards Crusader Kings II.

This a comprehensive guide for one for the hard achievements installed with the vanilla version of CKIII, “Mother of Us All”. This achievement requires the player to start as one particular character “Countess Daurama Daura of Kano” in the year 867, which is also the only recommended starting character in Africa and is marked as Medium in difficulty. The goal of this achievement is to unify the continent of Africa (the known part of the Africa to medieval Europeans displayed within the game setup), and convert it to the one true faith. Notice that the faith also needs to be reformed, which isn’t much of a problem for our Countess Daurama. For the purpose of this guide, I will be separating the whole strategy into different aspects and talk about my advices accordingly. Most of those could also be considered as some basic guides for game mechanism, so if you are familiar with the game already, you could just jump to the last section, where I will be providing a strategy guide in terms of the actually campaign progression and the general steps I recommend you to take during your play through.

Reforme Your Faith

Conversion is a major task throughout your entire play through. So I will talk about it first in this guide.
Old Bori Faith
You will begin with the Bori faith, which is an unreformed Hausan (African Pagan) faith with decent tenets, since all of them will be of great help when you are trying to accumulate the great amount of piety that is needed for a reformation.
Adorcism: Enables the decision to acquire Possessed trait, which is viewed as a Great Virtue for the follower of the faith with this tenet.
This tenet is useful if you would like to boost your piety gain so that you could set up your reformation. However, do be careful as this trait will impose a minor penalty to the health of the character.
Esotericism: Marks all three level of Wise Man as a Virtue, allows character to acquire such a trait through Learning focus as well as Pilgrimage.
A character with high learning is very likely to get the trait by finishing the pilgrimage, and it could be furtherly upgraded through multiple pilgrimages. The wise man trait is arguably one of the best life style traits installed in the game, as it enables the Hold Mystical Communion decision which grants the character 300 learning experience as well as a medium boost to the stats at merely a cost of 100 piety and a minor risk to get ill or lose 1level of devotion (the loss of devotion is not definite when occurred, you can always choose to not annul the decision if it happens).
Ritual Celebrations: Grant minor opinion boost to your courtier and vassals, awards 100 piety when starting a feast, and lose 100 piety when refusing a feast invitation.
This tenet is also good to acquire piety for reformation, however, gold is indeed a valuable resource in early games, thus you may not be feasting very often.
New Bori Faith
New Tenets

Since our goal is to facilitate a great conversion for the whole continent, here are several tenets recommended for the job.
Mendicant Preachers

For the +33% Conversion Speed modifier. Other buffs is to some extent irrelevant, but is good to have Temperate as a virtue as it boosts stewardship and health.
Sanctioned False Conversions

For the +30% Conversion Resistance as well as the unique Amnesty for False Conversions decision. This decision immediately convert the counties with Suspected False Converts modifier which is randomly occurred to heretic county within your realm, I am not completely sure about it, but it seems that the possible to have this modifier is greater if the heretic religion is closer or similar to the true faith, so it should be useful when dealing with the heresy blast induced brought by low fervor, which you should be suffering through several times throughout the game.
Islamic Syncretism

This tenet is recommended as it makes Islamic faith friendlier to you, since you will be confronting both Muwalladism in Maghreb region and Ash’ari in Egypt. After conquering those region, you will be facing huge populist revolt from local Sunni population, it would significantly slow their revolt if they see you as astray instead of evil.
Pursuit of Power

This tenet provide you with the Invasion CB which you will be losing after feudalization. However, it does impose a -10 opinion modifier which could be problematic.
Warmonger

Like the previous tenet, it also enables Invasion CB, and if you decide to have a head of faith, it also allows you to start great holy war.
Reincarnation

For the +20% Conversion Resistance.Other than that, Reincarnation is also potentially useful, but the probability to acquire it is quite low to be honesty.
Monasticism
A good tenet for you to manage inheritance without wasting your Renown and Prestige, which are incredibly valuable in early games as they accumulate slowly in relatively small realm.
New Doctrine
As for the doctrine, most of those are basically irrelevant. However, I recommend you to alter several key doctrine.
View of Gender-Male/Female Dominated
As long as it is not equal, you should have less children to disinherit. Since you could not manually change your gender preference of your succession law until feudalization, it is really painful to have like seven boys and girls to disinherit to protect the integrity of your realm.
Religious Attitude-Fundamentalist
Apparently it is required so that you could convert your counties much faster.
Marriage Type-Monogamous
It is relatively difficult to manage heritage in the early game of CKIII, so it won’t be much awarding to have a lot of children at least before the second era. I would recommend to have a monogamous doctrine, but it is not much of a big deal overall.
Witchcraft-Accept
The Witch Coven dynasty modifier is already overpowered in itself, not to say it also grant you with the Host Grand Rite decision, which basically grant you a free perk of random focus every 10 year if you are a witch. However, Bori is already accepting Witchcraft from the beginning, so no modification is needed.
Clerical Gender-Either
In early game, one of the most important way to disinherit your issues is to appoint them as your court chaplain. Also, when you are at about 1100 CE, you should have already have a strong family in terms of genetics so you should be able to appoint either your genius son or daughter with high learning as court chaplain to speed up the conversion.
Head of Faith-None
This is not at all a definitive recommendation. Nonetheless, I would personally prefer no head of faith simply because a head of faith with vices could be causing a lot of trouble to the fervor. On the other hand, you could always appoint yourself the head of faith, especially if you have the great holy war enabled.
Reformation
To initiate the reformation, you need around 4000 piety, provided that you have already unlocked the Prophet perk in the Theologian ability tree, which you are to complete to acquire more piety anyway. You also need to control three holy sites, one of which is your realm capital Daura; the other two relatively nearer are Garumele and Wandala to the west, and they are fairly easy to conquer.

Convert Your Realm

During most, if not all, of the play through, your court chaplain will be doing the conversion task. You don’t really need them to fabricate claims as you have so many other CBs to utilize anyway. To help with the process, it is advisable to Zealous Proselytizer and Religious Icon for every single generation. Usually, it would take 3-5 years to convert a county yourself.
However, it does not mean you have to do it all by yourself. Generally speaking, if you grant a heretic county to a character of your true faith, he should be converting the county immediate. Perhaps it is just my imagination, but it seems that the character with higher learning would do it faster. So it would be useful to grant them those counties that are harder to convert (like those with high development or those with Muwalladism which are hard to convert intrinsically). Also, if multiple counties are granted to the same person, like the player, they will only be converting one county at a time, thus it is also advisable to have each person one county to speed up the process, especially after a holy war for a huge kingdom like Andalusia with more than 30 counties.
However, with a CB like subjugation, upon success you will be vassalizing a great amount of heretic or even heathen characters. It would be much more problematic to deal with, however, since all other faith except the old Bori are considered evil, you could revoke those title as you wish without the annoyance of tyranny. Nonetheless, most of them will be revolting against you, and if one revolts, the other would join them since they will be in the same independent faction as they don’t like a heathen liege. It happens a lot in early game when both you and your house are not much prestigious renowned. Some perks in the Scholar tree would help to deal with foreign heathen vassal, but keep it in mind that most of the time it is unavoidable to have several revocation revolt each time you subjugate a big independent ruler.
Another setback you will be dealing with is the low fervor heresy outbreak which is briefly mention earlier. When it happens, it will turn one county into a heretic faith of the true faith, which Bori should only have one, the old Bori. After that, it will spread to neighbor counties and convert their ruler as well, usually a monetary gift is good enough to convert them back which will also convert the county back as well. However, if you do not have much budget for this, you could also leave it as it is as long as the highest tier ruler just below you remains with the true faith, they will be dealing with it themselves in time. Also, as it is mention before, Amnesty for False Conversions is incredibly useful in this situation. Anyway, sometime these outbreaks would help you conversion as it also raises the fervor significant.

Expand Your Border

However, it is not enough to just focus on the faith. You start with a small countess, and your goal is to unify the whole known Africa, which consist of around 450 counties. Luckily, starting as a tribal ruler provides you a lot of way to conquer massive lands with one single war.
Once per lifetime CBs
Subjugation

This CB is incredibly useful early one as it only cost 500 prestige for tribal government. However, you could only use subjugation as CB when your target is under tribal government, which means both the Umayyad and the Abbasid, your two ultimate rivals, are immune to this CB. Upon succession, you will vassalize your target, and if he/she is of the same or a higher rank, you will also usurp their highest title. However, as a result, it will significantly destabilize your realm as it would bring in either one huge disloyal foreign and heathen vassal, or worse, smaller but massive swarm of those vassals.
Invasion of Kingdom
This CB requires the character to have 2000 prestige. Most of the time, your target will not be of your own faith, which means you will need a huge amount of prestige to initiate such a war. In addition to the war cost, you will also need to have level 4 of fame, which is also hard to accumulate early on when your realm is small. Like subjugation, upon success, you will also be getting foreign heathen vassals, however, if your opponent hold lands outside your war target, they will remain independence and all land directly owned by him/her within the kingdom will become your own domain.
Holy war for kingdom

This CB is unlock once upon you reform your faith, and could only be targeting towards rulers with hostile or evil faith to you. The kingdom tier CB requires 750 piety as well as a level 4 of devotion, which is arguable harder to achieve than fame. Do keep it in mind that, each holy war, no matter what level it is, will lower the fervor of your faith by 10, so it is not advisable to start a ducal tier or lower. However, it is better than subjugation and invasion since it will make all counties of the target kingdom your own domain if they have a heathen ruler, which means you will not be dealing with the problem of foreign heathen vassal; instead, you will be dealing with unrelenting populist revolt, which is great in the size of hostile army but relatively easy to defeat as these are consist of simple revolting farms who do not know what is a retreat and simply perish upon defeat. However, for a kingdom of Egypt or Andalusia, since they are very well developed in the first place, you could have an army of 70000-100000 revolting farmers to deal with, and they could potentially revolt at the frequency of every three year upon defeat, which means you will not be doing any other expansion before converting at least 50% of these lands.
Other useful CBs
Kingdom tier claims for others

If your character runs out of large CBs and is still young, you could potentially claim the kingdoms for someone else provided that you are in the middle stage of the game and already at emperor/empress rank. Firstly, since you cannot invite anyone you want to your realm by give him/her simply 15 gold any more in CKIII, you will need to befriend the target with the kingdom tier claim. The scheme can be unlocked very early through diplomacy focus, and once you befriend your target, you can invite him/her to your court; notice that if the target is a junior partner in marriage (female in normal marriage, male in matrilineal marriage), the one you need to befriend will be his wife/her husband. Once they arrive, you could convert them first and then press their claim. Notice that the situation upon success is even worse than subjugation/invasion as in most of the cases, your friend will be losing a revolt against tyranny as he/her will immediately attempt to revoke titles of the heathen ruler. However, you can always deal with it as if it is a result of subjugation war.
Your own claims

On the other hand, you can always claim lands yourselves. However, I am not talking about those claims fabricated by your court chaplain as he/she is almost certainly occupied by converting task. Here, you will need the “Sanctioned Loopholes” perk which is unlock right before you unlock the “Scholar” traits. That perk enables you to buy claim with piety, 250 piety per county to be more precise. During late stage games, you will be accumulating piety at a higher rate when you have the Grand Temples as well as the Universities in Madrid and Cairo. With the extra piety, you could easily buy enough claims that allows you to create small kingdoms which are held by nobody and thus have not claimant. Just remember to keep all those claims within on single opponent realm so that you could press them all together.
Seize all de jure land

This should be the CB that you will be using several times at the end stage of the play through. It is unlocked in the last era and allows you to finish up with your conquest once you have all Africa de jure kingdoms or empires. However, this CB consumes a great amount of prestige, especially when the counties to be conquered are in multiple duchies or even kingdoms.

Enjoy Your Life

Throughout the whole game, you will be mainly focusing on three of the five aspects, diplomacy, stewardship and learning. But of course, I am not saying that Martial and Intrigue focus is useless, they just do not appear useful in contrast with the other three.
Diplomacy

All important perks in this focus can be unlock very early, with sufficient congenital traits and education, you could actually get all you need in merely 5 years. Forced Vassalage and True Ruler are the most important ones, also it is good to have Befriend unlocked as well. The ultimate traits are not particularly useful, so there is no need to keep too focused on this lifestyle.
Martial
You don’t really need to focus on this lifestyle if you will not be facing strong enemy overall. The tribal ruler around you are no threat when you rise to the level of empire, Coptic kingdoms are quite week and those Muslims basically have no interest in your lands. However, if you do get several perk unlock through grand rite, invest it into the strategist tree for even a stronger army. Also, Bellum Justum perk also provide you with cost reduction if you find the “seize all de jure land” CB in late game cost too much prestige.
Stewardship
You should mainly focus on the Administrator tree as it would stabilize your realm and make larger your army to conquer new lands. As a tribe ruler, you don’t particularly need to construct a lot of buildings in you domain or squeeze more money out of your subject, thus I recommend to alter the focus once you get the Administrator trait.
Intrigue
Like that of martial, you won’t be needing hostile scheme very much throughout the campaign. However, you could always use a decent amount of dread to keep your realm intact. I do not recommend to invest very much into intrigue focus, but if you do want to get several traits unlocked, you could go with the Torturer tree to keep your vassals too scared to revolt. In addition to that, dread would also help you with demand conversion should old Bori outbreak happens.
Learning
This has always been the main focus of this campaign. Usually it is helpful to get at least on trait unlock as well as some perks from other tree. Scholar tree would do you the biggest favor since it would make those foreign heathen vassal like you more, and thus allow you to convert them with a higher successful rate. As it is mentioned before, you also need the first three perk in Theologian trait to speed up the conversion. Also, Know thyself allows you to prepare for the death of character, which is extremely helpful when succession could be really troublesome during middle stage of campaign where your realm is reasonably a big one but dynasty is not quite renowned enough help the heir to deal with potential revolts.

Survive Your Succession

Inheritance

This has always been an issue before you have primogeniture law of succession, which usually you could only get after 1200 CE in CKIII. This means you will have to narrow the number of your eligible children down to one especially when there are multiple titles of your highest rank. Several ways that could be used to disinherit your eligible son/daughter.
Disinherit as dynasty head
It would ultimately cost significant amount of prestige and renown which accumulate slowly during early stage. Note that you will not be able to disinherit if your target is outside your realm, like when marrying as a junior partner, you child will be following your child-in-law into their court.
Appoint him as court chaplain: According to the game mechanism, all theocratic ruler are automatically disinherited. However, if you change your court chaplain from your child to someone else, your child’s eligibility of inheritance will be restored.
Ask him/her to take vow
This method requires the corresponding tenet to unlock. So, if you think succession will be a huge problem to you, you could get that tenet upon reformation.
Get him/her killed on the battlefield

Cruel as it may seem, sometime this is the best way to prevent an imbecile or inbreed to sit on that throne of yours. Knight him/her and let him/her face thousands of heathen armies all alone.
Mulitple kingdom inheritance strategy
Provided that your character are an emperor or empress, if you hold multiple kingdom titles and less eligible children than the number of kingdoms; upon succession, your primary heir will keep all the domains and other children will each get one of the kingdoms and remain vassal of your primary heir. Thus you may want to keep as many kingdom titles as possible, however, it won’t work if you have more than one empire title as you second child will be grant the second empire and thus become independent. Furtherly, under confederate partition, even if you did not create the second empire title, your second child will get it anyway as long as you have enough land to create it.
Survival Guide upon Succession
Usually in Crusader Kings Games, you will be facing huge threat when your current character dies and be replaced with your heir. Here are some advices to deal with the situation.
First of all, you should design an amiable and popular heir through education. Usually, you want to education your heir by yourself so that you could get some good or virtuous personality traits that will increase general opinion.
When succession occurs, the old long reign positive opinion modifier will be replaced with a short reign negative modifier and create an opinion loss. However, the short reign negative modifier could be shorten by both the dynasty legacy and the Pyramid special building in the County of Giza for a total -40%. Thus secure this two would be important. Nonetheless, new monarch will be facing large factions asking either for independence or lower crown/tribal authority. To prevent a huge faction, you should have your heir preparing to form alliance with several of your strong vassals. Thus you will need your heir to have several available children that could be either married or betrothed with those vassals. On the other hand, to diminish the inheritance issue you will be facing in the future, you won’t want your heir to have too many children as well. I think 4 would be more than enough to keep the faction in check. You could also imprison as many of vassals as possible before the demise of the old monarch, there will always be several known criminal within the realm, and it is easier to catch them when they have higher opinion.
You could also have your chancellor working on domestic affairs and improve general opinion. And of course, the power of gold is as amazing as always. Sending monetary gift is much cheaper for tribal rulers than feudal rulers, so you could theatrically bribe those people so that they like the new monarch in the early stage of this campaign.

Ck2 How To Make Pope Vassal

Enhance Your People

Dynasty Empowerment
Your dynasty will be growing stronger as the game process, however, for the purpose of future generations, you might want to speed up the process through legacies as well as several decisions.
Legacies
For this part, you should be focusing on Blood, Erudition as well as Glory. Start with Blood, at least complete level two for a greater chance of good congenital traits. As your realm grow bigger, you will be able to tackle greater enemies with your larger army, for the purpose of war, you will need the +10% prestige/piety gain modifier in the Erudition and Glory section; after that, aim for level 4 Glory legacy as it significantly shorten the short reign penalty in addition to the special bonus of the Great Pyramids.
Witch Coven
You should be getting this as soon as possible as it would be extremely hard to get when your house grows. Sometimes you will be getting a courtier with either witch secret or witch trait, and he/she will try to convert you. Accept it gladly as Bori faith actually allows witchcraft. Once you have the secret yourself, it will unlock a personal scheme to convert others. Immediately convert your heir and your family members, and take the decision “Found Witch Coven” and it will add permanently all members and future members of your house a strong buff that provides +10% Fertility, Medium health boost, +10 Hostile scheme power/resistance. It will also unlock the grand rite decision which grant you random perk every 10 years.
Strong Blood
You should also get this as soon as possible, unlike witch coven, it will affect all dynasty members instead just house members. In addition to a small health boost, it also enhance the possibility for inheriting good congenital traits and since it will affect other houses of your dynasty, it ultimately allows you to marriage your heir with distant relative who will also be getting good congenital traits on their own without the risk of producing inbreeds.
Other Decisions
There are other decisions that could potentially benefit the dynasty such as 'Consecrate Bloodline' and 'Dynasty of Many Crowns'. However, theya are not as helpful as those mentioned above, and dynasty of many crowns just does not fit in this campaign since you need to keep all land inside your realm.
Culture Shift
Countess Daurama starts as a Hausan, however, it does not means the family need to stay Hausa throughout the campaign. In current stage of the game, cultural shift could yield great benefit if you convert from an underdeveloped culture to an advanced culture. On the continent of Africa, the most advanced culture is probably the Egyptian. So the plan is pretty simple, take the Kingdom of Egypt from Abbasid, grant all lands expect for the duchy of Cairo which should be kept in your own domain, move realm capital to Cairo, convert to Egyptian culture through decision. Once you take the decision, you will be enjoying all the innovations that the Egyptians has already unlocked. However, since you are technically a foreigner to all your vassals after conversion, it is plausible to preemptively unlock the Open-Minded perk before the shift.

Advance Your Government

This is perhaps the most important and critical decision that you take throughout the whole campaign. A precise timing is needed for such a reformation in government. There are several conditions that are required for feudalization:

• Have Absolute Tribal Authority
• Have an Organized Faith
• Level of fame is higher than 2
• Development in Capital county is higher than 10
• All Tribal Era Innovations (except for region/cultural) unlocked

Except for technology, all other four could be unlocked pretty early, and all technology could be research around 1050CE. However, it does not mean you should feudalizing as soon as possible. On the other hand, settle from tribal to feudal significantly enfeeble your realm: it will replace your tribe with castle and destroy all buildings in the tribe and replace some of them with random castle buildings, which would, empirically speaking, shrink your tax income and size of levy by about 50%-60% and thus make you extremely vulnerable to other tribes. Besides, upon converting to feudalism, you will need to start to pay your man-at-arm with real gold instead of prestige, which would furtherly press your already degenerated economy. It would take some time to recover from the feudalization for sure, but you could instead do a more gradual version of feudalization instead.
In fact, if you wanted a little longer, several of your subject kingdom could feudalize before you do. This certainly give rise to a negative opinion, but it is still manageable and since they will also suffer from “the feudalization debuff”, they will be too weak to revolt, even if they don’t like you as they used to.
However, you should keep your realm on level 3 of tribal authority since level 4 only enables the decision of feudalization but have -30 opinion modifier instead -10 on level 3. You could simply rise it to level 4 when you are ready to feudalize. And by ready, my suggestion is that you could do it after you have conquered most of the tribal rulers in southern part of Africa, excluding those in Ajuraan area, and make sure the rest would be not strong enough to contest you when you are weak. A much safer plan is to conquer all tribes and then feudalize, and it should be done around 1080CE if the campaign is progressing decently. Just remember to save at least 3000 gold in case of the direst situations.

Step By Step Strategy Guide (Part #1)

When you start the game, you will notice that Countess Daurama, the Mother of Us All, has a set of excellent stats as well as useful personalities, great education and even greater lifestyle traits. In fact, she is easily one of the greatest starting characters with predetermined status, which means unlike most characters who get their random stats upon map generation, she will always start with such a skill set.
However, you will also notice, despite she is matrilineally married to his husband, who by the way is also a preinstalled character, their only child is not of mother’s dynasty. But don’t worry, there will be an event fires probably within a year that offers you option to deal with this inheritance problem. In terms of that event, I recommend you select the option that change your gender law to female preference and disinherit your son. As I mentioned before, it preferable to have an unequal gender law as it would lower your eligible children for inheritance. You could always restore the inheritance of your son later if he turns out to be great or you fail to have another good heir.
Before unpause the game, you could just declare a conquest war for neighbor County of Gobir. After that, conquer Tahoua and create the Duchy of Gobir for more prestige generation. If you are fast enough, you will get both county before they are sacked by raiders of your other neighbor. Once you have the Duchy, it is time to raise your raiders and start to accumulate some gold for later conquest. Start with the Kebbi and Air, and going farther into Dendi or Nupe. However, any county farther than that would not be recommended as it will cost too much attrition to your army.
The next goal will be forming the Kingdom of Hausaland, which needs six county in total. If the husband dies early, his land will be divided and make the Kingdom easier to create. And if not, get other county on the west to create kingdom title. If you have unlocked “True Ruler” perk, it is also possible to vassalize the husband, and have court chaplain fabric claim on his land and revoke them from his children after he dies.
After Hausaland is united, next war should be a ducal conquest of the Duchy of Bornu to secure the second Holy Site, and pave way for their third conquest, a conquest for the County of Wandala would be enough. However, it is relatively hard to have the Mother herself reforming Bori as most of her life will be focusing on Diplomacy and War. Thus you will need more learning oriented heir who can accumulate great amount of piety for the reformation. However, during Mother’s reign, she will be able to vassalize several count tier rulers with her extraordinary diplomatic skill, mostly among the land to the east that shares the true faith of her.
If your progress has gone well so far, you will be able to create the Empire of Kanem-Bornu by advancing to the east. Upon reach the border to Coptic countries, you should turn your head to the west and start to conquer those heathen tribal rulers. By that time, there will be at least one “great power” that you could potentially subjugation and absorb into you own realm. But before that, you will have to assess your own military strength as they will not be as weak as the tribe to the east. The help from strong allies is extremely important during this period of time as your uprising to be the sole great power of Africa is merely at its infancy. With land seizing CBs, continue to push westward until you see the South Atlantic Ocean, it would probably take about 200-250 years. Stay tribal during this period of time even if most of your vassals have adopt feudalism around 1050CE. You could stop the major conquest for perhaps twenty years and focus yourself enforce religious unity within your realm. Meanwhile, if the situation in the Horn of Africa is still a mass, you could the potentially waltz in and conquer the Kingdom of Ajuraan and/or the Kingdom of Outer Ajuraan. However, they could be simply dealt later after the conquest of Sunni regions of the Africa.

Step By Step Strategy Guide (Part 2)

Before the invasion to the Muslim world, make sure you could actually defeat either the Umayyad or the Abbasid. Usually, by around 1100CE, both of the two caliphate are very powerful. If you are lucky, you could find an opportunity to back stab them when they are busy fight the Catholic Crusaders. If you are extremely lucky, you could find a Kingdom of Egypt, or “Tulunids” as it is called by the Muslims referring to the ruling dynasty, independent from the Abbasid Caliphate. Grab Egypt with a Holy War for Kingdom CB, take the richest land of Egypt into your own domain, move capital to Cairo, fight of the Muslim populist uprising (there will be quite a few times before the conversion of at least half of the Egypt). When your realm is stable enough, you could now settle down as feudal emperor and shift your culture to Egyptian.
Alternatively, you could take, instead of Egypt, the Kingdom of Andalusia, which is equally developed but consist of more counties. However, you will be facing a much larger revolt, about 10k for the first time, and since more counties are joining the faction, the revolt is much more frequent than Egypt. Also, if you move your capital to Cordoba or Seville, you cannot take the “Unify Africa” decision as you would technically be considered a European nation.
After the defeat of two major Sunni powers, which should take not more than 100 years, you will also need to tackle another Christian Power who has land in the Mediterranean North Africa. It would usually be the Byzantine or Kingdom of Italy, which should not be that much of a trouble especially when you have both Andalusia and Egypt in your pocket. Should the Catholic still remain its dominance in Europe, their Crusader is more likely to target Iberia, Near East and Anatolia; in my experience, unlike CK2, Egypt is rarely targeted if those three above are still heathen, thus there won’t be much threat from the Pope.
Once you have taken control of all Africa Region, you can finally take the “Unify Africa” decision which immediately convert several heretic or heathen county as well as vassal in Africa. By that time, you should have at least 95% area converted, thus it would only require a decade or so to finish the job and get that achievement.

Conclusion

Personally, I finished this achievement on 25th of January, 1247CE, and I am not at all a very skilled paradox 4X game player myself.
In my opinion, this is not a hard achievement but indeed a tiring one: not in the sense that it is boring or something, but it would consume a lot of effort to achieve the ultimate goal. I sincerely believe that, unlike those insane achievements (The three mountains or the true heir of Timurid) in EU4, it is a doable achievement for almost every player.
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Ck3 Papacy

Although it might not seem like it when you start as a Catholic ruler, there are a lot of Casus Bellis (CBs) in Crusader Kings 2. Far too many for me to go through them and explain what they all do. If that’s the information you’re looking for, take a look at the Casus Belli section of the CK2 Wiki. What I’m going to be focusing on instead is how you actually go about earning these CBs. Understanding the theory and practice behind earning a CB will ensure that you never have to be at peace for long.

Fabricated Claims

In my original guide, How to Get Married and Go to War I briefly touched on the ability to fabricate claims on your neighbours. Simply tell your Chancellor to sit in a neighbouring province and he’ll have a percentage chance over time to generate you a claim. The chances of success are based on your Chancellor’s diplomacy stat, and with a high enough stat he can even create a claim on a whole duchy if the target holds one.

Although this is powerful when it works, the low chance of success and the fact that it’s entirely up to chance makes this a very unreliable method of expanding. It’s often worth using your Chancellor for this, but not as your exclusive method of expansion.

Press All Claims: Another strength of fabricated claims is the ability to press multiple of them in one war. If you have multiple claims on a target, you earn the new CB “Press All Claims” which, if you are successful, will give you all of your claims on the target, rather than just one county. Even better, as long as you start the war with this specific CB, any claims you fabricate during the war will be added to the victory condition of “all claims”. If you can afford to wait for multiple claims to generate, this is a great way of expanding quickly as a small count or duke.

De Jure Claims

De jure is Latin for “from law”, and is Crusader Kings’ way of dividing the map into various duchies, kingdoms and empires. Every province belongs, de jure, to a duchy, every duchy to a kingdom and every kingdom to an empire. This system governs multiple different mechanics, but the most important for this guide is the de jure claims.

When you are the holder or liege of a ducal title, you can ‘legally’ expect to be ruler of all of its constituent counties as well. This grants you the special “de jure claims” Casus Belli, which allows you to declare war to take a single county belonging to a duchy under your rule. You can only declare for one at a time, which makes it somewhat slow, but is a great way for dukes to consolidate their rule.

To generate a de jure claim you need to be a duke, which means creating a duchy title. To create a duchy title, you need to hold more than 50% of the counties that are part of that duchy (or otherwise generate and press a claim on the duchy title itself). So, in order to get access to this CB, you need to already have enough land to create a duchy, making it not so great for expanding as it is for consolidating power. However, if you can get your hands on a duchy, it is often the most convenient way to increase your realm size, and each duchy will have its own de jure claims for you to press.

Inherited Claims

Inheriting claims means playing the long game, but when you have 400-700 years of game play, it’s just a drop in the ocean. When a ruler dies, they pass claims onto their children, no matter what their succession law actually is, as well as passing claims onto the second and third in line of succession. Those in the line of succession will gain strong claims, and everyone else will gain “weak claims”.

Crusader Kings 2 Antipope

The important thing here, is that these claims can also be passed on to the children of the character who has them. So, if you want a claim on someone’s land, then marrying their daughter is a good way to get it. Their daughter will gain a claim on that land when her parent dies, then her children will gain claims when she dies. If her child is your heir, you’ll eventually have that claim for yourself.

This isn’t a great way to grow right now most of the time, so don’t use it for your short term goals. But, it will help you to secure claims further down the line, and with intelligent marriages you can end up with a lot of potential claims somewhere down the road, so that you’ll have plenty of options. Intelligent marriage is something I’ll be covering in another guide, but marrying for claims is one of the most important aspects to look out for in a spouse.

Weak Claims: Weak claims are a special form of claim that you can’t always use. A weak claim is the game’s way of representing that you have some legitimacy in claiming the title, but not over a strong ruler who already has it. As such, you can only press weak claims on characters who are currently in a regency (which usually means being incredibly ill, imprisoned, or a child), a civil war, or who are female. In order to press these claims you’ll need to either be patient, waiting for the right circumstances to come about, or engineer a situation yourself.

Claimants

Of course, you’re not the only one with claims on other people’s titles, and inviting claimants to your court is a great way to grow your realm, as long as you don’t mind sharing. When you press someone else’s claim on a title, their land will become part of your realm if:

• They are already your vassal;
• They are of your dynasty; or
• The land is de jure part of your realm.

Of course, they also have to be a lower rank than you. A duke can’t have another duke as their vassal, for instance.

Finding people with claims and inviting them to your court is strong, but hidden away in the complex interface. First, find the title you want a claim on by clicking on its shield in the character view. Once you’re at the title screen, there will be a button for “Claimants”. Click this and you’ll have a list of people with claims on the title, as well as thumbs up or down based on whether they’ll come to your court. If no-one will come, try to bribe one of them for a favour, and invite them that way.

Once you’ve invited a likely candidate to your realm, the easiest way to absorb their claim into your realm is to make them a vassal before declaring the war. Give them a landed title, then go ahead and press their claim. Once you win the war, they’ll take over the land as your vassal, bringing it into your realm.

Sanctioned Invasions

If you dream of grander prizes than a simple county or duchy, then you can always ask the Pope to sanction your invasion. This CB is relatively easy to find, but difficult to pull off for multiple reasons.

To request an invasion on another character, you need to have the same religious head (which in Catholic terms means you can only use it on other Catholics). You also need to have a claim on the target’s realm, or have a smaller realm size than them. As a method of generating a CB, we’re mostly looking at the latter. Being smaller than the target often means being weaker, which is one of the reasons that this is difficult to pull off, but often generating the CB is the harder part.

In order for the Pope to grant you the powerful Invasion Casus Belli, he must like you more than the target in question. He also has to dislike the target, who also must have less cardinals than you in the college of cardinals. All of this is difficult enough, but to say that you can only request it against someone larger than you narrows your options even more.

The best way to go about this is to get the Pope to adore you, by sending your Court Chaplain to improve religious relations in Rome. You can send your Chancellor there as well if you want to double down on it. Check on neighbouring kingdoms to see who the Pope dislikes, and keep an eye on them. Be patient, and you may get your chance.

It’s rare that you’ll get the opportunity to use this CB, but it’s always worth knowing about. If you can get it, it allows you to take the entirety of a neighbouring kingdom in one war, vastly improving your own standing and removing a threat to your own rule.

Holy Wars & Crusades

The Holy War Casus Belli is enable when you border a ruler of a different religion. This CB can be used for any neighbouring duchy that borders your land, and on success will grant you every title in that duchy that the opposing ruler and his vassals hold. Any vassals of your religion will become your vassal, rather than giving up their land. This is a great way to expand quickly, gaining up to 6 provinces at a time, but comes with its own downsides. When you declare a Holy War, any ruler of the same religion as the defender can join in if they border either you or the defender. Basically, everyone nearby is going to get involved, so don’t declare if an alliance of multiple neighbouring states could beat you, or declare intelligently when everyone nearby is distracted.

Crusades are a special sort of holy war, called by the Pope. The Pope will declare a Crusade for an entire kingdom title against a non-Catholic ruler who holds lands in that kingdom. Any Catholic ruler can join a crusade, and any ruler who shares a religion with the defender can join to defend them. It gets pretty messy. If the attackers are victorious in a Crusade, then all the land in the kingdom title will go to the ruler who holds the crown, if any. If there isn’t one (a crusade for Jerusalem, for instance) then the entire kingdom will go to the ruler who ‘contributed’ the most, which in this case usually means lost the most soldiers. The more soldiers you send and the larger battles you participate in, the higher your chance of gaining a kingdom title out of a crusade. There’s very little control over who a crusade is called against, however, so it’s not worth trying to engineer. Simply understand when you might be able to gain some land out of it.

An Exception: The one exception to the ‘differing religions’ activation of Holy Wars and Crusades are Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Orthodox and Catholic rulers don’t gain the Holy War CB on each other, nor can Catholics crusade against Orthodox rulers (Orthodox Christianity has no Crusades whatsoever). However, they also don’t count as being the same religion for defensive calls, so operate on a strange, uneasy balance when bordering each other.

This is just part 1 of the Casus Belli series, and focuses on the CBs that will generate more land for Catholic feudal rulers. In part 2 I will shed some light on non-territorial CBs, and why you would use them, as well as some CBs that are available to non-Catholic, non-feudal rulers.

As ever, if you have any thoughts or questions, please do drop a comment below for me.