Italy Megacampaign: Part 09: 1550-1560: Empire of Italy

My AE in Europe was really high, and I had too much manpower for a change, so I decided to finally deal with the Mamluks. I got Spain and Commonwealth to help me.

I tried to cobeligerent Candar and Karaman, as they were in a 3-way alliance. Karaman's AI did its bullshit, where it wouldn't respond to call to arms from Mamluks, so I couldn't cobeligerent them, but later responded to call to arms from Candar. Seriously, you should only have a chance to refuse once.

Naples and Tlemcen decided to trigger a coalition against me, so I had to take a detour to take their money.

I captured Mamluk's flagship, I'm still not really sure what "flagships" do. Then I took a lot of coastline, including two patriarchal seats.

After that one quick war with Florence, and I had all the provinces needed to form Italy. That did not make rest of Europe happy, I even had to bribe France with 700 gold to get off my case. My spending on influencing minors is really too high, and now I need to pay France too? Awkward.

Castile dragged me into some silly war in Africa against Ashanti, which could never end as Ashanti was sieged by Bonoman in another war - but Bonoman didn't have enough troops to actually finish. Castile's whole army stood next to that, but wouldn't join. So I had to travel all the way from Europe to do it for them.

After I won the war for them, I was finally able to form Italy.

I got my first CN - New Venice Islands. Pope thought nothing of it, and granted the whole region to Castile who was clearly second. Oh well, I'm mostly focusing on Indian Ocean for now.

Reformed League formed, but basically all of Europe joined Catholic side. Reformed side was just Russia and a few HRE minors. Well, that means I'm joining the Catholic side too, better Pope than Calvin. Pope respawned inside the HRE too.

England went Anglican, but Catholic zealots would have none of that. England controls zero of its provinces, between French, Catholic zealots, and Noble rebels, it's all occupied.

Now that I formed Italy, I got fresh missions. I also lost my Venetian unique government (with elections by lottery, and rulers until death) and need to pick one of the three:

• Plutocracy - regular merchant republic, elections every 4 years, extra merchant, -50 absolutism. Except it looks like I can't pick that and parliamentarism (so I'd have to disable parliament for 10 corruption).
• Oligarchy - regular republic, elections every 4 years, -40 absolutism
• Noble Elite - regular republic, elections every 8 years, -20 absolutism

This is a good time to think about mid-campaign modding. What would be a good government for reunited Orthodox Venice-Italy? I'll just code some combination that makes most sense.

• republic or monarchy are both sensible, and some hybrid system would feel even better
• theocracy is a stretch, but we are on the way to restoring pentarchy, and have very high patriarch authority, so a story here would be possible
• it definitely needs to have some sort of a Senate
• it should have some sort of trading or economic bonuses - even if it's not using merchant republic mechanics anymore, it should at least get +1 merchant or some trade power bonus out of respect for 1000 years of Venetian history
• it should not be overly expansionistic, or absolutist. Italian ideas are expansionistic, but that's not the campaign I'm having here.

I'm a bit tempted to make it elective monarchy, with parliament, for nice hybrid system.

Look at this fully striped England (better visible if you click on it)

My alliance with Commonwealth can realistically last the whole campaign, but Spanish alliance surviving this long is sort of amazing. We have conflicts of interest pretty much everywhere - New World colonies, African coastline, Genoa trade node, access of colonial goods, control over Italian islands. They probably still have missions on Morocco too. Just looking at the map, I'd have guessed that Italy and Spain are rivals.