Papal States: Part 08: 1511-1524: One Schism Ends Another Schism Begins

I did some reorganization. I deleted 8/10 forts, and it looks like there's 2 more in parts of North Italy I'll be getting soon anyway. I demoted Serbian from accepted and added Greek instead. Penalties for non-accepted culture were never really important, now you need to accept a culture to use its monuments, and the one in Athens is really good. There's no need to accept any culture without monuments, except early game.

I dissolved alliance with former HRE emperor Cleves, and got a diplovassal Trebizond instead. My main allies Spain, Austria, and Poland rivalled each other, so my diplomats are wasting a lot of time making sure they don't break alliance with me. It probably won't last much longer.

After the French Pope there was another disaster - a Portuguese Pope. At least he did a sensible thing and called for a Crusade against the Mamluks. Too bad only after I already declared a claim war against them, so I couldn't use the CB. I took Religious ideas as third, obviously, so I'll soon be having that CB without any curia actions.

The war goal against the Mamluks was Cyprus, so I was guaranteed a win as soon as I won big naval battle against them. After a bit of fighting, I only took Jerusalem area, and one province to release Syria. I'll come back for more later. Age of Heresy started, just a month too early, so I missed on 10% AE discount for it.

The Kingdom of God plan is a bit stuck - France guaranteed Savoy, and then Spain allied them, and Muscovy of all things guaranteed Genoa, and I need both for it. Well, there's always some way to pull on alliance chains. The chain didn't even take that long - Muscovy got into debt, and decided to disregard their guarantee on Genoa. So the only thing left is Savoy, and honestly if I have to fight France for it, so be it.

I did some loose ends cleanup, like Ragusa, Knights, Armenia, Marakesh's monument, Tafilat's gold mine, and so on. None of them is terribly important, but they add up. I also started setting up trade companies, and reached 150 monthly income, 15% there to economic hegemony.

I could be expanding faster but I'm constrained by governing capacity. Even Kingdom of God and its empire tier would only give me 25% more than what I have now, that's not enough to conquer China.

After doing a lot of missions, I befriended African Christians in Alodia, to unlock prerequisites for End The Schism mission. Poland did half the work for that, conquering Moskwa. This flipped every Orthodox nation to Catholic, but not their peasants (except Moskwa and Constantinople), so who knows how that's going to go.

So the old schism finally over, but Austria is really not doing a good job fighting the new one. It's already 3 electors, 6 other princes, and another schism just spawned, like one is not enough.

Zero Orthodox countries, so at least that worked

I'm not quite sure which way I'll go to reach China. Going through Egypt and Arabia collects a lot of monuments, but just Mamluks would take 6 more wars (so 90 years) to annex, and I don't even have governing capacity for it anyway. I could go through Persia instead, or join colonization late and sail around Africa. Whichever way I go, there's a serious risk of a global Sunni coalition against me.