Habsburg Megacampaign: Part 24: 1230-1239: Constantinople

On inheritance I had to finish a few wars, including weird vassalization war against some duke in Persian Gulf - looks like my vassal duke of Amalfi traded all the way to India, and took a city there, and things got out of hand. So now I border the Timurids.

Unlike previous kings of Arles who were mostly members of the Hermetic Society, I joined The Great Trade League.

I fell in love with a Greek princess, so I got for her duchy of Thrace - unfortunately without Constantinople at first. A lot of love adventures later, and I found myself ruling in Constantinople, and seriously entertaining secretly converting to her faith.

It's time for Imperial crown, just difficult to decide on Empire of What. Options are:

• Francia - would only have 3/5 de jure kingdoms, feels boring
• Latin Empire - 0/5 de jure kingdoms, doesn't grand special bloodline if I create it this way, I'd need to crusade against Byzantium to get it
• some custom Empire - instant 5/5 de jure kingdoms
• Byzantium - I'd need to flip Greek, conquer 3 duchies in the area, and it would change to their weird succession system with no way out
• HRE - I'd need to somehow become king of Germany, which is wrong way, and would have terrible succession system. If I wanted to be the HRE, I could have simply bribed the electors a century ago.

It's also nearly halfway through the first game, so it's a good idea to consider what kind of EU4 conversion I want. I'll probably flip religion as Catholic-only world is fairly boring, then keep expanding and turn my eventual blob into some kind of HRE, except modded to make unification harder.

I don't necessarily have to reach 1444 before conversion, I could stop sometime before that and fill in the narrative gap with however I want the conversion to go.

Meanwhile, the rest of my family:

• Norwegian king of England conquered Scotland and proclaimed himself emperor of Britannia, so my former double-king is now just a single-king of Ireland
• Crusader Finland went on a conquering spree and is now a triple-queen of Crusader Finland, regular Finland, and Lapland
• Anatolia is fairly stable
• Queen of Estonia/Poland somehow lost Poland so she's a single-queen now
• my brother Gotthard, king of Maharastra, is bullying all Indians like he wants to conquer all of India by himself. And I was wondering if he'll even survive until next crusade