taw's gaming: Prussian Amazons: Part 62: 1214-1224: The 7th Caliphate

20k of peasants rebelled in the most remote corner of my empire almost on Persian Gulf. Since I had to go there anyway, I found a claimant for Persia, and then I stayed to settle some local disputes.

After break from 1182 to 1214, 5th Sunni Caliphate (or 7th in total) got proclaimed by emir of Samarkand, vassal of Khiva. And of course he called a Jidad for Arabia. He's not even independent!

Caliph got a lot of forces, and it was a long walk for everyone - but at least that gave me a reason to stay a bit longer and help Persia even more.

I don't see how I can remove Caliphate forever without removing all Sunnis. Zikri Granada is slowly eating Spanish Sunnis; it seems that my claimants to Baluchistan and Persia might stick this time, which leaves just Khiva as the last major Muslim power. I don't like sending troops into Central Asia, but it's not like I have much choice.

Just after jihad I faced 30k host - I think my third in a row - and crusade for Italy. It was quite hard, as diseases reduced supply limit so I had attrition issues everywhere (I increased disease frequency, as they were really weak so far), and I had to chase few troops they sent all over Germany.

Crusade was just landless pope, holy orders (with 2 baronies between 3 of them), and weirdly two independent landless nomad clans. Those two clans seems rather bugged, with location like "leading troops in All realm provinces". Catholics ran out of armies - not counting those omnipresent ponies - so I had to wait it out while warscore ticked up. I think those bugged ponies reduced warscore, as it's scaled to total enemy armies.

It was so slow that I got yet another host before it ended.

Sadly Catholics won in Mali, so my hopes that it would all go Fraticelli failed - and I don't want to send my troops into deep desert.

And it turns out Plan Fraticelli wouldn't work anyway - mending the schism (as any variant of Orthodoxy) blocks Catholic (and Fraticelli if they ever setup their papacy) crusades, but simply demoting Catholics to a heresy by peasant Fraticelli, Cathar, Waldensian, or Lollard majority doesn't. I'm not sure there's much logic to these rules.

However - it would at least make Catholic holy orders Fraticelli, and that would make crusades much smaller.

Since it didn't seem likely that Egypt will ever make Krete Buddhist, I fabricated claim on it, paying obscene amount of money.

Surprisingly merchant republics can actually proclaim caliphate! They'd need to be either independent or with same religion liege - which is just one unlucky inheritance or independence revolt away. Much harder part is that they'd need sayyid trait, which none of patricians have, and it would be quite hard to get, but it wouldn't be the craziest thing I've seen.

I got my second Magnum Opus on transmutation, this time of perfect quality (+1 martial +2 stewardship +1 learning) - previous one about universal panacea was only 3/4 (+2 learning +0.5 health; perfect one would be +2 learning +1 health). With long line of rulers leading the Hermetic Society it should be possible to stack amazing line of hereditary bonuses - but you can only get them if you're a member of have very high learning (25 for top tier ones).

I wrote a script to list me all owners of interesting artifacts, and did some raiding to get a Lance (I hope for better weapon later) and Holy Prepuce (can't use as not Christian).